I can’t think of a pop-cultural hero more out of sync with wokeness than the blond, muscular, sword-wielding prince of Eternia known as He-Man. Thus when I heard that Amazon—of Rings of Power infamy—was making a Masters of the Universe movie, the thought never crossed my mind that it would be good.

Indeed, my first thought was, “How could they make Masters of the Universe any worse?” For I can’t think of a dumber and more cynical pop-culture “franchise.”

Star Wars made such a fortune with toy spinoffs that by the time Return of the Jedi rolled around, the merchandising tale was wagging the movie dog. Hence the Ewoks. Thus it made sense for toy giant Mattel to launch its own sword, sorcery, and spaceship franchise just to move merchandise

The villain of Masters of the Universe is Skeletor, a sort of cross between Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine. But Skeletor’s nemesis is not a callow, whiny farm-boy like Luke Skywalker. Instead, he is modeled on Arnold Schwartzenegger as Conan the Barbarian. Imagine the smirks at the pitch meeting: “. . . and we’ll call him ‘He-Man.’”

I confess that my only exposure to this franchise is the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie produced by Israeli schlockmeisters Golan and Globus, starring Dolph Lundgren as He-Man and Frank Langella as Skeletor. Everything about this film is cheesy and derivative: Skeletor from Star Wars, He-Man from Conan, costumes and sets from Flash Gordon and Star Wars. Even Skeletor’s costume change at the end is borrowed from Emperor Shaddam’s getup in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune book. The score by Bill Conti is a transparent rip-off of John Williams’ scores for Superman and Close Encounters.

There is very little back story and world-building. I guess they were assuming that their audience were all readers of comic books and watchers of Saturday-morning cartoons.

Dolph Lundgren looks great as He-Man, but he has very few lines, because he can barely speak, much less act. Also, he is often comical when wielding a sword or blaster. The fight sequences are quite clumsy and bumbling.

Frank Langella’s Skeletor shows that a good voice can sell lines on the level of: “Bwa-ha-ha, I am evil. [In case you were confused about his motivations.] Once I have the Sword of Power, I will be master of the universe. Kneel before me, pathetic Earthlings. Seize them, you fools, they’re getting away!” But Max von Sydow did it better as Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon.

The most appealing performance is a stunning young Courtney Cox as a California high-school girl. Yes, most of the action takes place in Southern California in the 1980s, which to today’s eyes looks far more idyllic than Eternia. The two main human characters are earnest blue-eyed high-school students. But they are still quite mature for the intended audience, for this movie is strictly for kids. The whole film has the production quality of a TV movie, maybe an Afterschool Special.

But Masters of the Universe offers the kids very little. It has just enough cool-looking costumes, sets, and shots for trailers and commercials designed to get kids to bug their parents to buy movie tickets. But the film itself isn’t all that entertaining. There isn’t even a moral to the story. Frankly, most ten-year-old boys with He-Man action figures could come up with better stories on their own.

So how could one of the wokest corporations on the planet make Masters of the Universe any worse? The answer is: it couldn’t. There was nowhere to go but up.

Of course you don’t need to make a good reboot to beat the original. But the new Masters of the Universe is actually a very good movie.

Beyond that, this reboot is politically interesting, because at Amazon (of all places), wokeness didn’t parody Masters of the Universe. Indeed, the new Masters of the Universe parodies wokeness.

The movie opens on a positive note. We hear the earnest, manly voice of the young He-Man filling in the back story. He-Man has a strong sense of identity: “Everything I am is because of where I come from.” He comes from Eternia, a world of beauty and magic, where fairy tales and legends are real. He-Man says, “I come from a pretty impressive lineage of mighty heroes. Noble, strong, fearless.” The rulers of Eternia protect it from evil with the Sword of Power. But they don’t just have the Sword of Power, they “use it.” Power is good, you see, because evil is real and must be defeated.

Throughout this monologue, the young He-Man is constantly parrying against cynicism about heroism and magic, which is precisely what a woke movie would have pushed. About 21 minutes into the movie, we learn why He-Man is battling with wokeness: because he’s surrounded by it.

Our young prince was exiled from Eternia as a child and raised as an orphan on Earth, in Oklahoma City to be exact. At the age of 25, he is known as Adam Glenn. Adam works in the Human Relations department of some mega corporation. Adam’s name plate on his desk lists his pronouns (he/him). Adam’s colleagues are precisely the sort of people you would expect in a HR department: a perky, power-mad black woman, a couple of neurotic white girls with pink and blue hair, and a neurotic nu-male named Darryl.

Adam is apparently pretty good at his HR job. His vocabulary is full of corporate team-building, conflict-resolution, and self-esteem speak. And even though Adam is a big, handsome Chad—which he tries his best to hide in a baggy pink shirt—his speech and mannerisms are very much those of an office-trained, long-housed nu-male. But in his spare time, Adam is hunting for the Sword of Power, which he lost in his rather bumpy arrival on Earth.

Naturally, this creates a conflict, actually two conflicts.

First, there is the conflict between Adam’s heroic identity and purpose, on the one hand, and modern “normie” society that values conformity and hedonism, on the other. Adam’s effeminate brown roommate Hussein (played by a Polynesian actor, because any brown person will do) urges Adam to forget about Eternia and learn to fit in, do his job, and live for the weekends (which means to live for self-indulgence). But for Adam, that means to “forget who I am and my entire life’s purpose.”

Second, there is a deeper conflict between Adam as a masculine white male and a society that denigrates all these traits. Naturally, when the big blond lug is seen hunting online for swords during his work hours, the neurotics around the HR office begin to get nervous. In the end, when it comes down to a choice between the Sword of Power and his corporate job, Adam chooses the Sword, which after some comic misadventures, brings him back to Eternia where he must confront the evil Skeletor.

At this point, Adam must learn to use the Sword of Power. But Adam, like a lot of over-nannied and under-fathered young men today, has some self-confidence issues. Shades of Unbreakable, Adam is virtually indestructible. But he doesn’t know it, because he’s never tested himself. This, of course, is very much a metaphor for all of today’s overcoddled young white men.

Beyond that, America today is very much a liberal society, animated by the faith that all conflicts can be resolved through talk. Adam has taken this to heart, and when he returns to an Eternia at war, it generates some genuine comedy.

But Adam grows into both his manliness and his role as prince, becoming increasingly willing to fight and kill his enemies. At a certain juncture, when his friends think Adam is about to give the Sword to Skeletor, that’s the furthest thing from his mind. Adam won’t give up the Sword of Power. Instead, he needs it to kill Skeletor.

When Adam is mocked for not knowing how to use the Sword, he retorts that he knows how but simply prefers not to. You see, Adam isn’t just a dangerous, muscular brute. He’s also wise. He knows how to make right use of the sword. He prefers peace. He prefers conflict resolution. He prefers covenants. But in the end, he knows that covenants are meaningless without the Sword of Power to enforce them. Beyond that, some people cannot be bargained with, because they are simply evil.

Liberals hold that human nature is malleable and thus “perfectible.” Mankind is not evil by nature but by nurture. Thus we can hope to cure evil through therapy and social engineering. Adam has tried to see the good in his enemies. He has tried to talk things out. But finally he has been rebuffed: “There is no good in me that you might uncover. There is nothing you can say that will change my nature. For I am a villain.” If some people are evil by nature, they must simply be conquered, which is why a Sword of Power comes in handy. Thus at this point, Adam declares “The time for talk is over.”

When Adam was a little boy, he made up his own names for the various heroes of Eternia. When the battle is over, Adam is asked if he made up a name for himself. “You’re gonna laugh,” he says to all the cynics and wokesters out there. Then he answers: “He-Man,” meaning “a strong man . . . a masculine fellow.” There’s a bit of scoffing. “What? It’s too macho?” To which his friends answer, “No, no. That’s very manly, and you are very manly.” And that’s it. No more apologies. No more irony. No more cringing.

There’s no time for any of that. A distress signal has come in. “This looks like a job for He-Man.”

Masters of the Universe is for manliness and power. It is against liberalism, wokeness, feminism, and weakness. Moreover, although this movie has many genuinely comic scenes, it does not poke fun at good things. It saves mockery for the evil and stupid; it attacks cynicism and irony directed at the good. These are very healthy messages.

Beyond that, Masters of the Universe is highly entertaining. The fight scenes and special effects are brilliant. The thrills are genuinely thrilling, and the comedy is genuinely hilarious.

Only two things annoyed me about this movie. First, there is a bit of tasteless sexual innuendo. Second, one of the major characters, the royal master of arms, Duncan, was race-swapped by Idris Elba. But it could have been worse. It feels like one of those eighties movies where the black sidekicks act white.

Aside from those caveats, everything else about this reboot is not just better than the original but good in an absolute sense. Anglo-Greek actor Nicholas Galitzine is excellent as Adam/He-Man. Jared Leto voices Skeletor like Tim Curry’s Evil in Legend, with the occasional lapse into Rocky Horror’s Frank N. Furter. Sasheer Zamata is hilarious as Adam’s girlboss. There really are no weak links in the cast, unless you count Dolph Lundgren, the big oaf, who has a cameo.

I also loved the music of Daniel Pemberton: imagine a fusion of Queen’s score for Flash Gordon and Howard Shore’s music for The Lord of the Rings. It works.

I was slightly annoyed when the director undermined Queen’s “Princes of the Universe” with a bit of irony in the middle. But he redeemed himself by matching the subsequent fight sequence to the words of the song, even the cringe-inducing line, “Bring on the girls.”

Masters of the Universe went through long spells in development Hell and Purgatory before hitting the screen, so it is hard to pinpoint who is responsible for making this such a good film.

My bet is on the director, Travis Knight, a white former rapper and the son of the co-founder of Nike. Knight runs a stop-motion animation studio. In addition to Masters of the Universe, he has directed two stop-motion animated movies, Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) and the forthcoming Wildwood (2026), as well as a live-action Transformers film, Bumblebee (2018).

We shall watch his career with great interest.

Now you need to watch this movie. I was surprised to learn that Masters of the Universe lost money at the box office. People are weary of superhero movies. Beyond that, critics were sensible enough not to denounce it as subversive Right-wing propaganda, so I simply assumed it would be more woke trash. But I predict the Masters of the Universe will become a cult classic. So make my prediction come true by watching it. It is now free to stream on Amazon Prime.

“Grifter” is one of the most abused words on the Right. A “grifter” is a confidence trickster or con artist: a criminal who steals by gaining then betraying the trust of his victims. Thus calling someone a grifter is accusing him of being a liar and a thief.

Unfortunately, the word “grifter” is used by some to stigmatize anyone in the movement who brings in money by any means: subscriptions, merchandise, donations, etc.

Since money is the lifeblood of any professional political movement, stigmatizing all money-making as theft would reduce the movement to a handful of amateurs. This would doom our movement to failure and our race to extinction.

Thus anyone who denigrates all money-making as grifting is doing the enemy’s work. They should be called out for this behavior, and if they persist, they are either stupid or evil and should be shunned either way.

Unfortunately, the grifter charge has staying power, because there are a lot of people on the online Right who act suspiciously like grifters.

How does one distinguish between a grifter and a legitimate online commentator? It has everything to do with sincerity: a grifter is a confidence trickster, meaning that he pretends to agree with you on important things so you will give him money.

By contrast, a legitimate take-seller sincerely believes what he says. If money changes hands, it is to support the cause both parties believe in.

How do you tell if someone is sincere or not? Some grifters make it easy to spot them by acting slimy and insincere. There are actually people on the Right—a lot of people—who want to be in abusive parasocial relationships with snake-oil salesmen. Thus it actually pays for grifters to be blatantly insincere. But if a grifter is really good at simulating sincerity, you’ll never know.

Still, there are some signs. Grifters are all about money, so they follow the money. A grifter pretends to believe what you believe so you will give him money. When the rewards of one belief begin to dip, he will abandon it for other, more profitable beliefs.

Everyone in politics follows the news cycle. It is natural to change one’s takes on changing events and people. It is also natural to drop topics when they are no longer relevant. It is also natural and healthy to refine one’s beliefs over time. So these are not signs of a grifter.

But one should be suspicious if someone flip-flops on fundamental principles and issues: pro-Jewish one day, anti-Jewish another; racial nationalist one day, civic nationalist another; etc. Sincere and principled people don’t make fundamental changes in a glib and casual way.

One should be especially suspicious if people move from radical ideas to mainstream ones. The mainstream is where the money is, but it lacks truth and goodness. While it is conceivable that apostates have found a deeper truth and a higher good closer to the political center, the more likely explanation is grifting.

Deep down, some people are not motivated by objective truth and the common good. Instead, they are motivated by attention and money. On a long enough timeline, and with sufficient incentives, such people will do anything for money and attention, and since the public is fickle, grifters must be fickle too.

There is another theory about apostates. Ex-White Nationalists like Richard Hanania, Patrick Casey, and Scott Greer are widely scorned as ideological turncoats or simple grifters eager to get on the good side of various Right-wing Jewish gate-keepermen. But what if they are still basically on our side? What if they are merely pretending to be apostates to better mainstream our ideas? If this is true, they may be delusional, but they are still somewhat admirable.

But if this really were true, then wouldn’t they want us to help sell their cover by scorning them as apostates anyway? If so, then I take some pleasure in thinking that Richard Hanania wants me to reduce him to a grease spot on the floor. So even if Hanania types are secret agents, nothing about our behavior toward them should change.

Grifters love to talk about religion, because if you adopt someone’s religion—or pretend to—that gives you instant credibility in the eyes of the community of believers, and grifters are all about finding markets and exploiting trust. Thus two of the biggest sociopaths who sully the Right, the Tate brothers, have advertised that Andrew Tate is a Muslim convert (probably because Muslims help one another get away with rape and pimping) and Tristan Tate is a “devout” Romanian Orthodox Christian (probably because he was living in Romania before being arrested for rape and pimping).

Grifters stick together: they exchange clout, publicity, and recognition, and they try to steal one another’s paypigs. So if you suspect someone of being a grifter, see if he hangs out with known grifters. It isn’t hard, since they are eager to advertise such connections.

Another way to spot grifters is to look at how they spend their money. Sincere activists plow their money back into the movement. Grifters are in it for themselves, so they spend money on themselves. The more they make, the more they spend. They are often easy to spot, because most of them are narcissists, so they make their consumption conspicuous.

Now some might be tempted to ask, “What’s wrong with grifters?”

In other words, “What’s wrong with people who steal through deceiving others about the most important issues in the world, like religion or the survival of the white race?”

I’m going to leave religion out of this and focus simply on politics.

First, we are in a battle of ideas. We can’t win if we don’t play. And we can’t play if we don’t take ideas seriously. Thus we can have no tolerance for people who pollute the battle of ideas with unserious attitudes about truth, principally ironic game-playing[1] and outright grifting. You may be delighted when a grifter with a large audience promotes your memes. But it gains you nothing if he flip-flops to the opposite side in pursuit of a new market.

Second, our goal is to preserve and restore high-trust white societies. To do that, we need to build a high-trust movement. Thus we can have zero tolerance for people who erode social trust. Morally speaking, a man who threatens you with a knife to steal your money is far cleaner than a man who cons you out of it with a hard luck tale. The robber steals only money. The con artist also undermines the trust that is the foundation of society. That’s why I would hang every conman, even a bum who cons you out of five dollars. Imagine the punishments deserved by people who would con our race out of its future.

Third, grifters are attention seekers, and when there’s little in the news cycle for them to react to, they will turn their focus inward and stir up some movement drama, which is highly profitable. We don’t need people who make that part of their business plan.

Fourth, grifters suck money out of the movement that could be used for advancing our cause.

At this point, we should note that the first three problems with grifters are shared by another, much larger category of people: online attention whores and drama queens who don’t sell merchandise or collect donations. They simply do it for the love of the game.

Thus money is not the root of this evil. The root is selfishness, insincerity, and unseriousness. Grifters are just the tiny minority of attention whores who manage to monetize their vices.

What can be done about grifters, attention whores, drama queens, and the like?

Very little. Directly attacking such people often makes them stronger. Thus the best thing is to sensitize the broader movement to the problem, teach them to spot such people, and encourage them to shun these parasites as moral lepers.

But if we can’t really rid ourselves of grifters, can we at least make use of them? After all, some of them have large audiences.

I don’t think it is worth the risk. First, grifters are bad for the movement. Thus anything that strengthens grifters harms our cause. Second, associating with grifters harms serious people. The audience you think you might gain is far less important than the moral and intellectual credibility that you will lose.

Note

[1] See Greg Johnson, “Postmodernism vs. Identity,” in From Plato to Postmodernism (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2019).

In “Against the ‘Marketplace of Ideas,’” I argued that White Nationalists cannot model our work on a business that caters to the given ideas and preferences of the public, because currently, the public mind is very much in the hands of our enemies. Thus instead of following the public, we must lead them; instead of pandering to them, we must better them.

But there are strong economic and social incentives to abandon hard White Nationalist truths for flattering mainstream illusions: you’ll make more money; you’ll be more popular; you’ll be more socially acceptable. How do we combat this?

First, we simply need to make people aware that there is a conflict at all. Freedom isn’t just having options; it is being aware of one’s options. We can’t really be responsible until we know that we are making choices and what we are choosing. If one does not grasp the distinction between pandering to the public and leading it, but one regards popularity and profit as measures of success, it is easy to become a panderer without even knowing it.

Second, we need to recruit people of good character who, when shown that they have the choice to lead or pander, will make the right choice—who will prefer truth, justice, and the common good over more personal and proximate rewards like money and popularity.

Third, the distinction between a business and a profession is useful here. Businesses measure success by profits. Professions measure success by promoting the public good. Our goal is the latter. We aim at nothing less than the survival and flourishing of our race.

Fourth, if our movement is more akin to a profession than a business, what sort of institutions should we build? Lawyers and doctors are professionals, but their firms are businesses—often very big ones. Still, we recognize that the profit motive corrupts the pursuit of the common good, thus we have restraints on corruption, namely professional codes of ethics as well as economic regulations. As bad as law and medicine are today, they would be far worse if they dispensed with the trappings of a profession and focused entirely on making money.

The best way to protect a profession from the corruption of market incentives is simply to make it a non-profit institution. But even non-profits need to bring in more money than they spend. Thus non-profits also face the temptation to corrupt rather than better the public, simply to pay their bills. This is especially the case with non-profits that need to fund themselves from day-to-day donations, which creates the very same incentives as in businesses existing on day-to-day sales. But this is not true of non-profits that are funded from the interest generated by large financial endowments.

Thus I think that the best models for our metapolitical institutions are churches or universities that have large financial endowments. Such institutions are about upholding and propagating a body of knowledge. And because they have large endowments, they don’t have to chase money, which removes the corrupting incentive to change their messages to match the public mood.

The purpose of a church is to preserve and uphold revealed truths and share them with the world, regardless of their popularity at any given time. Obviously, this would be difficult if, to survive, churches had to win weekly popularity contests with competing churches and religions, as well as secular belief systems and weekend sports.

Americans don’t like the idea of an “established” church, meaning a church that enjoys official status and government subsidies. But such a church does not need to compete with other churches to fill its coffers. Thus it would be less likely to set foot on the slippery slope that leads to modern American “megachurches” sponsoring rock concerts and preaching the gospel of prosperity.

Religion is essentially different from market transactions. A business does not tell potential customers: “You are ignorant; your desires are corrupt; you are guilty. You need to become better.” Instead, a business seeks to satisfy the given preferences of potential customers. The best salesman flatters his customers. He doesn’t threaten them with damnation.

If you have money in your pocket, a shirt on your back, and shoes on your feet, you are good enough for most businesses. You don’t need to improve your knowledge, character, and tastes to become a good customer. In fact, those would just get in the way.

But what if people really do need moral and spiritual improvement? The first step is always to tell them, even if it hurts their self-esteem. Imagine, though, if a church’s survival depended on competing with churches that preach that human beings are naturally good, thus you are fine just the way you are. Obviously, more people will buy the latter message in the “marketplace of ideas,” even if it reinforces their vices—including the vice of complacency—leaving them worse off.

Like churches, educational institutions are primarily about preserving and passing on a body of knowledge as well as improving the character and tastes of students. Like religion, education is premised on the assumption that the student is not good enough the way he is. He is ignorant. He is vulgar. He has bad habits. Otherwise, he wouldn’t need to learn anything.

Thus, like religion, education is fundamentally different from the market. Education is about improving a student’s knowledge, character, and preferences, not catering to his existing level of ignorance, vice, and vulgarity. Thus to do their edifying work, educators need to be insulated from market incentives.

Perhaps the single most subversive institution in modern higher education is allowing students to evaluate teachers. If a teacher’s pay and promotion are affected by student evaluations, this creates an incentive to flatter students, lower standards, and inflate grades, because one gets better evaluations with easy courses rather than hard ones. In effect, student evaluations empower students to resist the essential educational relationship by replacing edification with catering, pandering, and flattery, thus corrupting both higher education and themselves.

How can our movement maintain the purity of our message and goals in the face of the constant pressure to compromise in the pursuit of economic and political popularity? We need to create non-profit educational organizations with large financial endowments that insulate our thought-leaders and opinion-makers from economic incentives to compromise on essential matters of principle. Of course, even though we cannot compromise on the content of our message, we should also encourage innovation and pragmatism in the means by which we persuade more and more of our people to our side.

From a White Nationalist point of view, the main problem of modern churches and higher education is not that they preach unpopular ideas but that they preach the wrong unpopular ideas because these institutions have been captured by the Left. Thus once White Nationalists finally have our equivalents of the Ford Foundation, we must take special care not to succumb to institutional subversion and capture. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, to have institutions worth stealing?

Years ago, a friend told me a parable about a species of hominid that did not live to inherit the earth. These hominids regarded each and every entity as entirely unique. When a tiger leaped out of the darkness and dragged one of them to his doom, this did not prompt any generalizations about tigers as a group. Thus when a new tiger began to prowl the shadows at the verge of the firelight, he was not judged on the basis of the other tiger’s behavior. Indeed, if the first tiger came back, they would not have judged him on the basis of his past behavior either, because that was then, and this is now: two unique, individual moments in time.

But even though tigers are not always man-eaters, and man-eaters are not always hungry, these poor creatures still went extinct, because their problems were not limited to tigers. They could not learn from any experiences at all. They were just too dumb to survive.

Survival, you see, requires the ability to learn from past experiences so that one can predict and even control future ones. To do this, however, one must recognize that there are not just individual beings, but kinds or types of beings. Individuals belong to the same kind if they share a common nature. And, since what we can do follows from our nature, we can infer that if a tiger is dangerous once, it will probably be dangerous again. And if one tiger is dangerous, it is probable that other tigers are dangerous too. Thus if one of us is killed by a tiger, we can take reasonable precautions to make sure that it does not happen again.

Drawing conclusions about kinds based on individuals is called inductive generalization. Induction allows you to infer that all members of a kind are “like that” based on one’s experience of individual members. These purple berries made me sick today, so they will probably make me sick tomorrow, since their nature and mine will probably not change overnight. And since you have the same nature as me, they might make you sick too. And since the purple berries on this bush are the same as the ones on the first bush, they’ll probably make us sick too. The flesh of this animal tastes good to me, so it will probably taste good to you too, since we have the same nature. And other members of its kind will probably taste good to us as well, since they have the same nature too.

However, induction also teaches that natural traits tend to graph along bell curves, with a large number of typical cases in the middle, and small numbers of atypical cases on each end. Typical purple berries will make us sick, but on every bush, there might be some that have no negative effect and others that are downright toxic. Thus, inductive generalizations hold “not always, but for the most part.” In terms of any given trait, “Not all X are like that.” But most of them are.

Inductive reasoning is, therefore, probabilistic. There is always the possibility that one is not dealing with a typical instance of a kind. But it is not likely, since the atypical is by definition rare. Furthermore, as we experience more particulars, it becomes less likely that we are dealing with outliers, and our generalizations about a type become increasingly fixed. We even come to have a sense of what outliers are typical.

Although this is not common parlance, one could refer to a well-established inductive generalization as a “stereotype,” which comes from the Greek stereos, meaning “fixed” or “firm,” and the Greek typos, or “type.”

Inductive generalization does not just allow us to learn from past experience, which would be of merely theoretical interest. Induction also has important practical implications, for it allows us to predict future experiences based on past ones, thus allowing us to act advantageously, even intervene in the course of events and control natural phenomena.

Another word for predicting future experiences is pre-judging them. Another word for a pre-judgment is a prejudice. Now, some prejudices may be utterly baseless and irrational—e.g., prejudices rooted in bad inductive generalizations, superstition, or mental illness—and acting on them may lead to disaster. But well-founded inductive generalizations (stereotypes) are the basis of well-founded prejudices that can be highly advantageous—for instance, helping us to discriminate between dangerous breeds and gentle ones, poisonous mushrooms and edible ones, etc.

Induction, by giving us the ability to predict future events, is the foundation of practical reason, which is the primary human means of survival. Induction is also the basis of science and technology, which allow us to more deeply understand nature and thus to predict and control her better. Induction is thus the foundation of the ongoing conquest of nature that we call modernization and progress.

Stereotypes and well-founded prejudices may be triumphs of inductive reasoning and the foundations of common sense, science, technology, and progress. But today, when it comes to judging human beings, we are told that stereotypes and prejudices are evil and that each individual should be judged on his own behavior, not on the basis of the past behaviors of his kind. We are told that it is an injustice to judge individuals based on group membership.

This viewpoint is a kind of perversion of individualism. I myself defend a kind of Aristotelian individualism. I hold that the purpose of life is the actualization of our individual potentialities for excellence. In terms of politics, a well-ordered society should encourage individual self-actualization and excellence, as long as it does not undermine the common good of society.

The perverse individualism I reject, however, has nothing to do with individual self-actualization. Indeed, it basically amounts to a moral imperative to be stupid, since it is an attack on inductive generalization as such, which is the foundation of practical reason, science, technology, and the modern world. Perverse individualism demands that we behave like the hypothetical hominids discussed above, which were simply too stupid to survive.

False individualism is really an applied form of nominalism, which is the theory that there are no natural kinds in the world, only individuals, and all concepts of kinds are merely social conventions or “constructs.”^[1] According to false individualism, justice requires that we ignore all groups—except, somehow, “humanity”—and judge each individual as an individual, without any preconceptions based on his membership in any merely constructed category, such as race. Nominalism, however, is metaphysically false. There are real natural kinds. Individual members of those kinds share natural traits that allow us to make probabilistic predictions about them based on what we know of their kind.

An individualist could, however, reply that even though nominalism is metaphysically false and there are natural kinds, we should still set aside our well-founded stereotypes and prejudices and judge each and every human being as an individual. In effect, we have to treat every individual as a potential outlier, even though most of them are not. Why? Because, apparently, every individual is of infinite value, so rendering justice is an absolute value and committing injustice is an absolute evil. We must act as if nominalism is true, because otherwise there is a vanishingly small possibility that we might be unjust to a stranger.

This position is a moralistic absurdity, for it simply cannot be practiced. There are seven billion people on this planet. It is impossible to treat each and every one as a special snowflake, and if one tried it, even with the limited numbers of people we encounter in our individual lives, it would consume all one’s time and make it impossible to pursue one’s own goals, i.e., to actually live. Because the purpose of life is self-actualization, and the time we have is short, we just cannot get to know everyone we deal with.

One of the ways that civilization advances is by giving us means of dealing with greater numbers of people than we can ever know as individuals. The market economy, for instance, allows individuals to interact with millions of others around the globe through a largely anonymous symbolic medium that, at least in theory, allows all participants to pursue their individual self-actualization.

Psychologists have observed that the human mind cannot deal with more than 150 or so direct personal relationships, which means that if we could deal only with people as individuals, civilization would regress to the complexity of a hunter-gatherer band or agricultural village.

Well-founded stereotypes and prejudices make possible highly complex societies by allowing us to size up individuals at a glance and to choose to embrace or avoid them. Since natural kinds are limited in number, we actually create artificial kinds with visible distinctions—accents, clothing styles, even uniforms—that allow us to chart a course through complex social situations at a glance. For instance, a black man dressed in a ghetto clown costume signals danger, whereas a black man dressed in a police uniform signals trustworthiness.

Furthermore, if stereotyping is wrong, why do people go to great lengths to stereotype themselves? We all want to find like-minded people, and dressing in a certain way is one means to communicate the group we belong to, e.g., hipster, preppy, metal, redneck, businessman, career woman, slut, prole, gay clone, black thug, etc. Blacks go to great trouble and expense to dress like thugs, in order to communicate that they are dangerous, or that they aspire to be. Why do white liberals think it is disrespectful to take their signaling seriously?

The idea that we should always treat others only as individuals also undermines one of the greatest gifts of modernity: privacy. It is fashionable to bemoan the impersonal and mediated nature of modern society, but in a smaller scale, more personal society, everybody knows everybody else’s business. Thus it can be liberating to live in a society in which most people only know you by the persona you project and the money that you spend. Years ago, a student of mine told me that she grew up in a small Georgia town full of prying, censorious Baptists. She said she could hardly wait to move to Atlanta. I’ll never forget her reason why: “So I could sin.”

Under what conditions do we want to be judged as special snowflakes? We all want a fair shake when we are applying for a job or are on trial for our lives. But even then, chances are we are trying to conceal as much as we reveal. Moreover, we know that employers often can only look at the most superficial criteria simply because they lack the time to dig deeper. But we hope that we can at least expect justice from the criminal justice system. Beyond that, when nothing really crucial is at stake, we are content to navigate with prejudices and stereotypes, i.e., to play the odds with others and accept that others do the same with us.

Since nobody can judge each and every person as an individual all the time, it stands to reason that people only trot out this imperative to use as a weapon against others. Universalists of both the Left and Right typically deploy it against any form of racism, nationalism, tribalism, or antipathy to various religious groups or categories of sexual deviants. Of course, if you prod these universalists just a little, you find that they have some rather poorly formed and emotionally charged stereotypes and prejudices about their opponents.

“Not all Xs are like that,” the universalists say, implying that it is a mortal sin not to appreciate the uniqueness of every special snowflake. And since group membership can never be a basis for excluding someone from our society, there can be no racially and ethnically homogeneous societies, and we cannot uphold any norms of social and sexual behavior. Thus perverse individualism is just a tool to make us incapable of resisting ethnic dispossession and social decadence. What kind of people preach (but do not practice) “blindness” to race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual identity as a moral imperative? Obviously, people who are up to no good.

If you propose discrimination against pedophiles, you will be told that they aren’t all child molesters, and you can’t do anything against them until after they have been caught. If you propose discrimination against blacks or mestizos because of their propensity to criminality, you are told that they are not all like that, and we can’t do anything against them until they actually commit crimes. If you propose discrimination against Muslims on the grounds that their religion mandates lies, rape, terrorism, murder, enslavement, and the overthrow of all governments, you will be told that not all Muslims are like that, and we can’t do anything against them until after they have committed a crime. If you propose discrimination against Jews because they are a hostile elite working to corrupt our politics and culture and destroy our race by promoting white guilt, miscegenation, and race-replacement immigration, you will be told that they aren’t all like that, and it would be collectivism to treat them simply as an enemy group. We have to treat all members of problem groups as if they are innocent, until proven otherwise. It is immoral to try to separate ourselves entirely from problem groups. Instead, we need to give them a chance, which boils down to a chance to harm us. And that means no borders and no standards.

These perverse individualists might even try to argue that the soldiers of an invading army are not all out to kill us, so it would be unjust to kill them just because they carry arms against us. But at that point, we would see what they really are and stand them against a wall. Of course, by then it might be too late.

I am a nationalist because I believe that racial, ethnic, and religious diversity within the same political system are not strengths but weaknesses. They are constant sources of simmering tension that frequently boil over into hatred and violence. Thus the best guarantee of peace and harmony is to create separate homelands for all peoples. A healthy society also requires norms regarding sexuality, marriage, and child-rearing. Thus a society has to practice discrimination. We have to discriminate between who is us and who is not. And within our group, we have to discriminate between the normal and abnormal, the optimal and suboptimal, the law-abiding and the criminal.

We can freely acknowledge that there are some good blacks, Muslims, and Jews. There just aren’t enough of them for our tastes. But even if these groups were equal or superior to us—and they are bound to be superior in some ways—in the end they are simply not us, and we wish to create societies for ourselves and our posterity. We are not creating a team for a sporting event or a spelling bee by recruiting exceptional outliers from a wide range of different groups. We seek to create homogeneous communities with full ranges of both average specimens and outliers, i.e., organic white communities, which are one in blood and culture but diverse in abilities, opinions, and interests, so that all of our people have places to call home.

Counter-Currents, December 16, 2015

^[1] Greg Johnson, “Why Race Is Not a Social Construct,” Toward a New Nationalism, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Counter-Currents, 2023).

In my talk “Freedom of Speech,” I offer a strong argument that freedom of speech—even for our enemies—is necessary for a healthy society.

On the Right, it is common to speak of freedom of speech as an unregulated “marketplace of ideas.” To some extent, this is true. Ideas can be bought and sold like fish and firewood. Moreover, we want the freedom to sell our ideas, and we want the public to be free to buy them.

But the “marketplace of ideas” leaves out something crucial. Thus it is a bad model for understanding what we are doing. Indeed, accepting this model actually subverts our goals.

To understand why, we must make some distinctions.

At any given time, the public has a set of ideas and preferences. These are simply “given.” There are two basic ways to deal with “given” ideas and preferences: catering to them or improving upon them.

Catering to given ideas and preferences means giving the people what they want—or at least what they think they want. There’s nothing wrong with that, if their ideas and preferences are good enough just the way they are.

But obviously, White Nationalists don’t think that. We think our people have been programmed for self-destruction. Thus they need better ideas and preferences. Our job is to provide them.

There are other ways to draw the distinction between catering to and improving upon given ideas.

In terms of personal relationships, one can distinguish between flattery and friendship. A flatterer tells people what they want to hear, even if it is bad for them. A friend tells people what they need to hear if they are to get better.

In cultural and educational terms, one can distinguish between corruption and edification. To edify someone is to build him up: to replace bad habits with good ones, false ideas with true ones, crude tastes with refined ones. There are two forms of corruption. The most obvious form is to make people worse: to corrupt their characters, tastes, and ideas. The less obvious form of corruption is simply to make people comfortable with and complacent about their current state of imperfection.

In political terms, one can distinguish between pandering and leadership. Panderers give the people what they think they want, i.e., they conform to the people’s given ideas and preferences. Panderers may be in perfect agreement with the people, or if they are not, they hide this fact in order to gain power. Leaders, however, seek to improve the people’s ideas and preferences, not merely cater to existing ones.

Leadership in this sense is completely consistent with populism. Populism means upholding the common good of the people as the standard of political legitimacy. That’s what the people really want. However, there is often a distinction between the real common good and what people erroneously think is the common good. Panderers cater to such errors, whereas true leaders try to educate the people to understand their true interests.

Talk of the marketplace of ideas encourages us to think of our movement as a business. But that’s a fundamental mistake. Businesses measure their success in terms of profits. The most profitable businesses, however, cater best to the given ideas and preferences of the public. There’s less demand for those who challenge the reigning ideas of the age, so there’s less profit in it.

Thus our movement cannot think in terms of pleasing the public. After all, many of our people seem pleased to be on the path to extinction. Instead, we need to think in terms of improving the public, which many of them will find most displeasing. Our goal is to save our people, even if we have to drag them kicking and screaming into the future.

In sum: Because our people do not widely support White Nationalism (yet), we must improve the public’s ideas and preferences, not cater to them. We must edify our people, not corrupt them. We must lead them, not pander to them. To do this, we must be willing to tell them unflattering truths, not soothing lies. On every point, this is the opposite of what’s rational in the marketplace.

At this point, we need to introduce another distinction between the form and the content of our message.

The content of our message is simple: white people, everywhere on the planet, are on the path to extinction due to mass migration and below-replacement fertility. To save our race, we need a new political system: sovereign homelands for all white peoples. We need governments that put the preservation and advancement of our peoples ahead of competing economic and ideological concerns.

We can’t change any aspect of the content of this message, because there’s no middle ground—no compromise—between survival and extinction. If whites are not pursuing survival, other forces in this world will drag us to extinction.

Currently, this isn’t a popular message. But promoting some other message won’t help us. So our only option is to make White Nationalism more popular.

This brings us to the form of our message. There are infinite ways to promote our ideas. But some are better than others. Since there are many white audiences, populist, elitist, and boutique forms of outreach are all legitimate. Ideally, there should be as many forms of White Nationalism as there are groups of white people. But the core message for every audience must remain unchanged.

However, even though we cannot change our ultimate principles and goals to chase popularity, the form of our message definitely can and should. Metrics like profit and online “engagement” are useful for testing different forms of outreach.

There is a Latin maxim that captures the approach we should take: “suaviter in modo, fortiter in re”—which means flexible in form, inflexible in content. It is necessary to make this distinction, for otherwise, people will be tempted to change the content of our message in pursuit of popularity and profit, instead of trying out new ways of promoting the truth.

I will end with another important distinction: between a business and a profession. Businesses measure success by profits. Professions measure success by promoting the public good. Professions include medicine, law, education, and the clergy. True statesmanship, of course, should be added to this list.

We should think of our movement not as a business but as a profession, serving the common good of the race and, ultimately, of the whole world.

But how do we build institutions that protect this lofty mission from the corrupting incentives of the “marketplace of ideas”? That is the topic of my next essay.

As an advocate of “highbrow” White Nationalism, I have been asked to weigh in on a social media influence operation deploring “low-IQ” forms of prejudice, specifically “low-IQ anti-Semitism.” Unsurprisingly, this op has been spread by Zionist influencers like Bronze Age Pervert, Will Chamberlin, Captive Dreamer, Ian Miles Cheong, and Patrick Casey.

If one deplores “low-IQ” anti-Semitism, doesn’t that imply that there is a better, “high-IQ” version of anti-Semitism out there? That’s the natural reaction of people who are interested in ideas, i.e., genuinely high-IQ individuals. Oddly, though, these influencers never call for or provide models of “high-IQ” anti-Semitism (for example, the work of Professor Kevin MacDonald).

There’s a simple explanation for this. People like Captive Dreamer are objecting to anti-Semitism as such, not just the low-IQ version. Calling anti-Semitism “low-IQ” is not an attempt to promote a high-IQ alternative. It is simply an attempt to stigmatize all anti-Semitism as dumb.

Who is the audience for this influence op? Not genuine high-IQ people, who have the intellectual curiosity to wonder about the “high-IQ” version of anti-Semitism. Instead, the intended audience is middle-IQ people who are less concerned with having true beliefs than with parroting high-status ones.

There really are low-IQ forms of anti-Semitism.

For instance, the whole realm of “Israel killed Charlie Kirk” conspiracy theories is shockingly stupid. I am pleased, of course, that there’s a strong demand for such theories. Vast numbers of people believe that Zionists are evil enough to kill Charlie Kirk. As a general rule, if someone is capable of genocide, they are capable of any lesser form of infamy. But just because Jews are capable of killing Kirk and benefitted from it doesn’t imply that they actually did it, especially when there is overwhelming evidence that Tyler Robinson is the killer and had very different motives.

Low-IQ forms of prejudice really are a problem, because they crowd out the more intelligent versions. Naturally, our enemies are eager to promote awareness of low-IQ prejudices to stigmatize prejudice as such. In fact, that’s what our Zionist enemies on the Right are doing with the “Low-IQ anti-Semitism” meme.

In fact, in the very act of deploring “low-IQ” prejudice, they are actually creating such prejudices. They are stigmatizing the entire category of prejudices by displaying only the worst examples.

In my essay, “In Defense of Prejudice,” I argue that the “prejudices” deplored by the cultural and political mainstream are far from low-IQ stupidity. Indeed, they are precisely how intelligent, rational beings learn from experience and act accordingly.

Prejudice just means “pre-judgment,” with the “pre” specifically meaning “before experience.” If one touches a flame and is burnt, one is hesitant to touch the next flame. One has pre-judged it as harmful. If the purple berries on a bush make you sick, you are hesitant to eat the purple berries from the same kind of bush in the future. You have pre-judged them as harmful.

Philosophers and scientists call this sort of reasoning “inductive generalization,” which means drawing conclusions about entire groups of things based on specific examples. In simple layman’s terms, “inductive generalization” means learning from experience, then applying one’s knowledge to new experiences.

Thus a world without “prejudices” is a world in which we learn nothing from experience. Imagine encountering every new flame, every new tiger, every new pitbull, every new snake, every new puddle of smelly green water “without prejudice.” We would be incapable of learning from past mistakes and misfortunes. We would be incapable of feeling fear in the face of new dangers. Thus we would make the same mistakes, and suffer the same misfortunes, over and over again. In short, we would be far less capable of survival.

What is the difference between “high-IQ” and “low-IQ” prejudices?

One difference is that high-IQ prejudices are actually based on experience, whereas some low-IQ prejudices are not. For instance, the idea that this particular pitbull is dangerous is a prejudice based on experience, whereas the idea that this black cat will bring bad luck, because such cats are in league with the devil, is a baseless superstition.

Another way of distinguishing between high- and low-IQ prejudices is that intelligent people understand that inductive generalizations are merely probabilistic, meaning that there is some chance of error. After all, our experience of any particular entity is limited. Thus future experience is not likely to confirm all of our expectations.

For example, in the case of the purple berries, one concludes that something about the nature of the berries made one sick, so one should avoid berries of the same kind in the future. However, it is possible that the berries themselves are not at fault. For instance, perhaps the one particular bush you ate from had been contaminated by germs, and the germs not the berries made you sick. Or perhaps the berries were simply not ripe.

From a theoretical perspective, these objections are well-founded. But what if you are not a scientist? Are you under any moral obligation to entertain alternative hypotheses about purple berries? Only if you were starving, and purple berries were the sole available food, would you have reason to rethink your prejudices.

Beyond that, the issue of IQ doesn’t really come into this, because smart people can make honest mistakes and have no reason to revisit them.

Another way in which prejudices can be low-IQ is failing to differentiate between normal cases and outliers. Within every natural kind, traits are distributed on bell curves. For instance, this means that some pitbulls really are cute, harmless little fuzzballs. Thus to make inductive generalizations properly, one needs to preface them with the words, “not always, but for the most part . . .”

Again, from a purely theoretical point of view, this is correct. But from a practical point of view—especially when one is talking about avoiding dangers—it is foolish to bet that any particular tiger or pitbull or black or Muslim is an outlier.

The truly high-IQ position is to look at prejudices from a practical point of view. Practically speaking, low-IQ prejudices are better than high-IQ prejudices for two reasons.

First, low-IQ people need low-IQ prejudices to keep them safe. Children and low-IQ adults cannot be trusted to make intelligent exceptions to rules, so they will be safer if you teach them to follow some rules categorically, i.e., never get in an elevator alone with a strange man, never associate with non-whites, don’t hang out with drunkards and druggies, etc.

Second, there is a sense in which low-IQ prejudices are actually smarter than the “high-IQ” versions. Countless people have been murdered, robbed, and raped because we have dismantled racial prejudices based on the “high-IQ” objection, “Yes, but not all Xs are like that,” which is known as the NAXALT fallacy.

For instance, if Donald Trump had believed that all Jews were liars who are loyal only to their own people, he would not have destroyed his presidency by starting the Iran War based on lies cooked up by the Israelis. Indeed, Trump would have been better off even if he had accepted stupid, crazy, and superstitious beliefs about Jewish evil.

Trump, of course, had extensive negative interactions with Jews. But he was just clever enough to think “Yes, but not all Jews . . .” Yet he wasn’t clever enough to realize that only fools bet on outliers rather than averages. Thus basing one’s actions on NAXALT is not a sign of “high-IQ” but of consummate midwittery.

Jim Goad, America’s greatest satirical journalist since H. L. Mencken, is dead.

James Thaddeus Goad was born on June 12, 1961, in Ridley Park, Pennsylvania. He died on June 22, 2026, in Albuquerque, New Mexico of long-term health problems. He had just turned 65.

Jim was the youngest of three sons of a working-class Catholic couple. Jim was highly intelligent, with talents not just in writing but also in acting and music. Before he settled on writing, he wanted to be an actor. After high school, Jim moved to New York City to pursue acting. He was accepted to study acting at New York University under Stella Adler. In the end, he opted to study journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia. He graduated with a B.A. in journalism in 1985.

After graduating, Jim relocated to Los Angeles with his then-girlfriend, Debbie Rosalie, to be a journalist. He worked at the Los Angeles Reader. He and Debbie married in 1987. In 1991, he published the first issue of his pioneering “zine” ANSWER Me! Three more issues followed, in 1992, 1993, and 1994.

In 1994, on the strength of ANSWER Me!, Jim signed a two-book contract with Simon & Schuster, with an advance of $100,000. He and Debbie moved to Portland, Oregon, where Jim wrote his first book, The Redneck Manifesto: How Hillbillies, Hicks, & White Trash Became America’s Scapegoats (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

ANSWER Me! and The Redneck Manifesto were my introductions to Jim’s work in 2000.

ANSWER Me! is basically a compendium of irreverent interviews with people like LSD booster Timothy Leary, pimp Iceberg Slim, Satanist Anton LaVey, murderer Richard Ramirez, racist David Duke, and racist Al Sharpton—as well as essays on unpleasant topics like suicide, serial killers, pedophilia, and rape, all of them illustrated with unsettling photographs, collages, and cartoons.

Needless to say, it was enormously controversial. ANSWER Me! was banned for obscenity and blamed for a White House shooting and four suicides, including Kurt Cobain’s. But the controversy simply increased interest. The last two issues had printings of 13,000, and over the years, ANSWER Me! has been reprinted again and again, in increasingly deluxe editions, as a testament to its status as a transgressive pop-cultural landmark.

Beyond Jim Goad himself, ANSWER Me! was my first encounter with the brilliant cartoons of Nick Bougas (A. Wyatt Mann) as well as such characters as Adam Parfrey, Boyd Rice, and Shaun Partridge.

Along with Adam Parfrey’s Apocalypse Culture volumes, ANSWER Me! was my introduction to a pre-internet counter-culture that had emerged in the 1980s and 1990s in zines and alternative publishing houses: transgressive, misanthropic, politically incorrect, inegalitarian, racist, sexist, and far-Right coded.

Today, ANSWER Me! seems like a forerunner of image boards like 4chan and 8chan, as well as the wilder shores of the online Right. At the time, such spaces were necessary to incubate heretical ideas. But today, as inegalitarian ideas are becoming mainstream, a lot of it seems like needless, self-marginalizing baggage.

The Redneck Manifesto is a book on anti-white racism, focusing on how rich and liberal whites have made poor whites into scapegoats for “racism,” which is the catchall explanation for persistent black failure. One of the most subversive features of the book is its discussion of white slavery in the United States.

The Redneck Manifesto doesn’t offer any political solutions to America’s race problem. But it is a call to reject white guilt, and that alone has revolutionary implications. Despite the author’s studied cynicism and constant wise-cracking, The Redneck Manifesto ripples with moral fervor. Goad is scathing in his critique of liberalism and compassionate in his defense of white scapegoats.

When it was first published, Goad’s Manifesto was just as politically incorrect as ANSWER Me! Because white identity politics has grown so much in the last three decades, the Manifesto seems almost tame today. But there will never be a society in which ANSWER Me! will seem tame, and that’s probably a good thing.

I bought my copy of The Redneck Manifesto on July 6, 2000. I breezed through it and liked it so much that I wanted to contact Jim Goad. But when I looked into it, I discovered that he had been sentenced in 1998 to two-and-a-half years in prison in Oregon for beating up his girlfriend, a stripper named Anne “Skye” Ryan.

Jim started dating Skye in 1997 while still married to Debbie. By all accounts, Jim and Debbie were not a good match. She had an IQ in the 80s—which is odd, considering that she was Jewish and her father was an M.D.—and she was highly neurotic. In November of 1997, Debbie took out a restraining order against Jim, claiming that he had physically abused her and threatened to kill her. They divorced in December. However, after Jim was arrested for beating Skye in May of 1998, Debbie withdrew the restraining order, saying that he had changed. She died of ovarian cancer in 2000.

Obviously, there was a dark side to Jim. He described his upbringing as hellish. His father was brutal. His mother was neglectful. He attended a Catholic school run by nuns, whom he described as sadistic. Subjected to bullying at home and school, Jim learned to give as good as he got.

Jim had a sadistic streak of his own. ANSWER Me! is clearly intended to make people uncomfortable. Jim’s humor was also mean. But he never picked on the innocent, and he found such behavior repugnant. Still, he went out of his way to find guilty parties to unload on. There was clearly a lot of anger there.

Jim shared quite a lot about his difficult and failed relationships with women. In some of his relationships, he seemed to be punishing himself. He told me that when he met his third wife, Norma, he didn’t feel that he deserved such a good woman who simply wanted to make him happy. But he decided to stop punishing himself and enjoy his life. I last spoke to Jim a week before he died. “How’s the Missus?” “Just an angel,” he replied.

Jim’s second book, Shit Magnet: One Man’s Miraculous Ability to Absorb the World’s Guilt (Port Townsend: Feral House, 2002), was an autobiographical work written while in prison. I hated it. I was angry that such a talented writer, who obviously saw through the reigning lies of our time, was wasting his talent wallowing in self-pity and self-justification.

I wrote a scathing review entitled “Redneck Rousseau: Jim Goad’s Shit Magnet” under the pen name J. P. Nash and sent it to Vanguard News Network. This sums it up: “Shit Magnet is the most repulsive exercise in self-pity and self-justification by a narcissistic, borderline personality since Rousseau’s Confessions, and from a literary standpoint it is almost as brilliant.” I thought Jim was a strange combination of nihilist and narcissist, and the inner freedom of the nihilist was being wasted due to a narcissistic need for public approval.

When I got to know Jim, I realized this was wrong: he was not a nihilist. Yes, he was dismissive of talk about morals because he recognized that most people simply used it for preening or personal gain. But there was a strong moralistic streak in Jim, a strong sense of justice, and a tendency to rake himself over the coals. What I thought was “narcissistic” phoniness was a simple desire for justice.

Jim hated the review and put me on his enemies list. I stopped paying attention to him entirely. I didn’t miss out on much. Just books like Trucker Fags in Denial, with illustrations by Jim Blanchard (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2004) and Jim Goad’s Gigantic Book of Sex (Port Townsend: Feral House, 2007).

Sometime in the mid-oughts, Jim moved to the Atlanta area, married his second wife Shannon, and fathered his son, Zane (born in 2008), who sadly is profoundly autistic.

I started following Jim again when he began writing regularly for Taki’s Magazine in April of 2009. I loved his columns. They were a return to the form of The Redneck Manifesto: hilarious and scathing chronicles of liberal, feminist, and rainbow sanctimony as well as anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight hate.

His best work from this period can be found in The New Church Ladies: The Extremely Uptight World of “Social Justice” (Stone Mountain, Georgia: Obnoxious Books, 2017), Whiteness: The Original Sin (Obnoxious Books, 2018), The Bomb Inside My Brain (Obnoxious Books, 2019) (see my review here), and Gender Psychosis: Insanity and Sexual Identity (Obnoxious Books, 2020).

I reprinted a few of his Takimag pieces at Counter-Currents. Jim, however, held a grudge for the Shit Magnet review and banned me from commenting at Takimag.

In November of 2019, Jim made a snarky comment on Twitter about my expulsion from Norway. I responded with flattery (sincere flattery) to turn away wrath. Jim sent me a private message: “Magnanimous reply, Greg.” We started chatting, set aside our differences, and, to my great surprise, we became friends.

Jim felt my review of Shit Magnet was unjust and I accepted his very level-headed and lawyerly argument. He did, however, tell me that he thought it was well-written, which meant a lot coming from Jim Goad.

Jim was unsatisfied with Taki’s Magazine. I crunched the numbers, talked to a couple of donors, and made him an offer. He came on board at Counter-Currents in October of 2020 and wrote two columns a week until January of 2025—more than 400 pieces in total.

I gave him a lot of freedom, edited him lightly, and paid him promptly. In return, he gave us some of his best work, meticulously edited and delivered like clockwork. No excuses, no diva tantrums, just pure professionalism. He was a joy to work with.

The first time we met in person was in 2022 on a sweltering day in Atlanta. The OK Cafe was mobbed, so we ended up having lunch in a Jewish deli. There was a twinge of anxiety before we met. After all, Jim had written quite a lot about how . . . difficult he could be. But as soon as we met, I felt at ease. There was zero drama the whole time I knew and worked with Jim.

As a side note: Jim had many online detractors. They loved to play “gotcha” with him, brandishing embarrassing revelations to the world, as if they were unearthing long-hidden secrets for the first time. Every one of these revelations came from Jim himself, in one of his books. They weren’t lying about Jim, but these pompous frauds were definitely lying about themselves by pretending that they were being more honest than Jim himself. .

When Jim joined Counter-Currents, he wanted to be clear that he wasn’t joining a “cause” or “movement.” Not long before, he had backed out of speaking at an American Renaissance conference because he felt their description of his work implied that he was part of a “movement.” Jim was very much the cat who walked alone.

I had no problem with this, because I think that White Nationalism is actually stronger when people who are not “in” our movement stick up for our concerns and our right to a hearing. Jim was satisfied with this answer.

I told him that his scruples about this struck me as “autistic.” It was a throw-away comment, but Jim took it straightforwardly. That too struck me as autistic. Jim and I both thought that the term was overused. But he also believed that he was “on the spectrum.” Jim was afraid that if he joined a “cause,” it would completely consume his life, as Catholicism did when he was in his teens.

Jim and Norma moved to New Mexico in the fall of 2024. He had grown to hate Georgia and wanted a new beginning. But the move proved extremely stressful. Some people move like dogs, who find it an adventure. Others move like cats, who find it sheer terror. Jim was in the cat category.

Jim had health issues. Back in 2008, he had surgery for a brain tumor. Then there were two bouts of prostate cancer. He also had cardiac problems. The move came on the heels of the second round of cancer treatments. Cancer and moving are among the most stressful things in anyone’s life. Having them back-to-back must have been crushing. But Jim soldiered through it. After the move, however, he sounded highly anxious and extremely depressed.

Although he had tried every drug on the street during his misspent youth, the Jim I knew abstained completely from drink and any drugs that could affect his mental state. Thus he was resistant to suggestions to get prescribed benzos for anxiety and SSRIs for his depression. He had what I call, “That ‘can’t do’ attitude,” which I just chalked up to depression talking.

Jim stopped writing in January of 2025. I offered to pay him for reprints of his best work from previous platforms. But after a while he stopped sending them. When I asked why, he told me that there was no more good material. That’s when I knew he was depressed.

I had entertained the idea of Jim putting together some collections of his Counter-Currents essays, but there was no hope of that until he snapped out of what was ailing him.

I missed him. His fans missed him. People constantly asked about him. But we talked less and less. Whenever I asked him how he was doing, he would dutifully report on his situation, and I felt that this just deepened his depression.

The last time Jim and I spoke was on June 14, after I broke the news that one of his dearest friends was terminally ill. I asked him if he could write an obituary. He couldn’t. He could barely write emails. There was news of his health, though: his cancer had returned.

Jim Goad is one of the most interesting and talented people I have ever known. As with Jonathan Bowden, Leo Yankevich, and Charles Krafft, we must now say goodbye. We will remember his life and work. But we should also remember his death, so that we make the most of the time that remains to us.

I will announce any plans for a memorial service. In the meantime, I wish to invite Jim’s other friends and colleagues to share their recollections at Counter-Currents.

It would be a help to Norma if Jim’s webmaster would get in touch as well.

Jim was preceded in death by his father, Alton Howard Goad; his mother Margaret Mary Goad; his oldest brother, Alton Howard Goad, Jr.—known as Bucky—who was brutally murdered in France in 1969 when Jim was eight; and his first wife Debbie.

Jim is survived by his brother, John Francis Goad, who is 13 years Jim’s senior; his second wife, Shannon; his son, Zane; his third wife, Norma; legions of friends and fans; and of course his body of work, which will only grow in influence and regard as white Americans continue to get uppity.

https://counter-currents.com/2026/07/ode-to-jim-goad/

Recently, a fan told me that he was looking forward to my review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I hate to disappoint my fans, but my answer is that I am not reviewing it. I cannot review Nolan’s Odyssey, because I will not see it.

I won’t watch The Odyssey because it doesn’t meet two basic criteria for seeing a movie. First, I see a movie if it seems like an interesting story. But I already know the story of The Odyssey. So there will be no surprises there. Second, if I already know the story of a movie, I might still watch it if I like the director and/or some of the actors and wish to see how they handle it. But none of Nolan’s cast particularly interests me, and I already know enough about how he is directing The Odyssey to conclude that it won’t be enjoyable or interesting. It will just be a disgusting desecration.

Dominique Venner referred to Homer as “The European Bible” (see my translation: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). This is fitting, as the Iliad and Odyssey were foundational books for the ancient Greeks and those influenced by them, which eventually became all of Europe and by extension the world.

But the Bible is an imperfect analogy, since the Greeks regarded Homer as somewhere between historical truth and pure fiction, as evidenced by their willingness to change the stories in retelling them, usually for edifying purposes.

Thus I have no objection to artists like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides using Homer as “source material.” Nor do I object to Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato subjecting Homer’s depictions of gods and heroes to moral critique. Nor do I object to later philosophers offering allegorical readings of passages from Homer.

There’s something exalted about Homer. But it isn’t “holy writ.” Thus fulminating about taking “artistic license” with Homer isn’t particularly Homeric or Greek. It actually seems quite Jewish, Christian, or Islamic. In truth, it is grotesque when avowed “pagans” talk about Homer like Jews and Christians talk about the Bible.

Thus if a new Aeschylus or Sophocles were to take liberties putting The Odyssey on the big screen, I would be eager to see it.

Bringing The Odyssey to the screen does not just “license” changes. It demands them. It takes anywhere from 10 to 13 hours to read The Odyssey aloud from beginning to end, depending on the translation, of course. To dramatize the whole story on screen, it would take anywhere from 12 to 24 hours. Many things that are narrated would have to be shown, so most of Homer’s words would be turned into people, places, and things, plus deeds. Obviously, not everything could be dramatized in a 2-hour movie. Cuts would have to be made. The story, of course, would not be cut. But some episodes could not be included.

Then there is the issue of translation, for at least some words of Homer’s dialogue and narration should be included in any screen adaptation.

But there are limits beyond which an adaptation becomes a parody, a desecration, and an insult to the audience. Nolan has crossed that line.

A decade ago, I would have welcomed Christopher Nolan’s vision of The Odyssey. Indeed, when I saw his 2017 movie Dunkirk, I thought Nolan would be a perfect director for The Odyssey, for both stories are about homecoming by means of a dangerous sea voyage in times of war. And Nolan’s homecoming in Dunkirk was emotionally overwhelming. Thus I thought he could do justice to Homer. I’ll let Dunkirk be his Odyssey and skip this one.

Nolan is highly talented. For years, I thought he was our best living director after David Lynch and Martin Scorsese. But Nolan’s decline set in with Tenet, an incoherent movie featuring a talentless Affirmative Action Hero. Oppenheimer was flawed, but a hopeful uptick. The Odyssey now confirms that Nolan has gone “Hollywood,” which is to say, he has gone “woke.”

This means that Nolan isn’t really in charge of his Odyssey. Instead, he’s been possessed by the woke Zeitgeist, which is as evil a spirit as has ever stalked this world.

Wokeness is simply anti-whiteness. It seeks to destroy whites by indicting everything great about white civilization as evil or sick. It seeks to de-center whites from white stories and white societies, replacing whites with non-whites, white men with women, and normal people with homosexuals and transsexuals.

The most common woke trope is blackwashing: depicting white characters with black actors. There are various lame excuses made for such moves: providing blacks with “role models,” puffing up their self-esteem, making stories more accessible to them, etc. But when a historical character like Finland’s leader Marshal Mannerheim is depicted by a black actor, all those excuses fall away. Such casting is not directed toward blacks at all. It is simply directed against whites. It is an act of hate. It is spitting in our faces.

The same is true with The Odyssey, which is a story about white people in Ancient Greece and Troy. The Odyssey should be cast with white actors who looked as much as possible like the characters described by Homer.

Nolan, however, has cast a black actress named Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy was supposedly the most beautiful woman of her time, the “face that launched a thousand ships,” a woman over whom a long and bloody war was fought. Lupita Nyong’o, however, is ugly. If she were Helen of Detroit, nobody would fight a rap battle over her, much less a gang war. Casting her is just an insult to white people, specifically to white women and white standards of female beauty.

Nolan also casts mixed-race goblin girl Zendaya as gray-eyed Athena. This too is simply an insult. Zendaya can’t act. She’s not beautiful. She’s just Hollywood’s go-to girl for displacing white actresses.

Nolan also includes a black named Travis Scott who is apparently a “rapper” as a bard named Demodocus, as if oogaing about bitchez and money is in any way comparable to Homer. This too is an insult, but I can actually get behind it, because it is so stupid that it will be sheer torture for liberals to keep a straight face.

At this point, one might be wondering why the “diversity” in this film is so monochrome. Why no Papuans and Polynesians? Why no Chinese or Indians? If you dig further, it turns out that there is a Lee and a Patel among the extras, plus a few more blacks. Thus blacks remain massively over-represented. Thus The Odyssey is quite America-centric. Only in America have blacks protested and pouted their way to such symbolic centrality.

This is elegant proof that diversity casting is not about making films more “representative” and “inclusive,” else there’d be a Hottentot in every cast. It is simply an exercise in insulting whites by displacing us with the non-whites that are the most offensive to white people and most plentiful in Hollywood. That would be blacks.

There is, however, one more flagrant bit of diversity casting: a female to male transsexual named Ellen now Eliot Page was cast as Sinon, a character that doesn’t actually appear in The Odyssey. Just count your blessings that “Eliot” isn’t playing Achilles. Of course, there’s actually a role for an androgyne in The Odyssey: Tiresias the seer. But Eliot wouldn’t fit the part, because she cut off her dugs.

Why a transsexual? Even mushy Christian conservatives love putting black people in their dramas these days. By including this particular form of insanity, Nolan signals that he is fully on board with the woke crusade against white civilization. It is another gob of spit in our faces.

I am simply not going to piss away a bit of money and three hours of my life to be insulted this way, and neither should you, dear reader. Don’t even hate-watch this film. Just boycott it.

There are better things you can do with your time. Why not actually read The Odyssey? That’s my plan. In the time it would take for you to watch this movie, plus watch all the ads and previews, plus commute to and from it, you can read from a quarter to a third of Homer’s original. I recommend the Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles translations. But I am planning to try out A. T. Murray’s revised Loeb Classical Library translation.

Once whites finally come home, scour our lands of interlopers and collaborators, and reprise control of our destinies, we can commission a film adaptation that does justice to The Odyssey. In the meantime, stick with Homer.

That’s what Odysseus would do.

When people say, “Demographics is destiny,” they mean that as America (or any other white country) becomes less white, political power will move into the hands of non-whites and their allies, principally the Left, which will be bad for America.

In White Nationalist circles, we constantly claim that “the demographic clock is ticking,” as if it is connected to a time-bomb. The explosion is white dispossession. The clock reaches zero as soon as whites sink below 50% of the population. And that’s all folks!

But this isn’t necessarily true.

The whole scenario assumes that non-whites will be able to wield political power by voting.

Demographics is not destiny if non-whites cannot vote.

As a White Nationalist, I hold that the best way to escape the destiny of white dispossession is racial separation by creating sovereign white homelands, which would require moving borders and/or moving people. Basically, this solution removes the clock connected to the explosive.

But there’s another escape as well: disenfranchisement. We simply take away the votes of the colored people. This is analogous to cutting the wires between the timer (white demographic decline) and the dynamite, stopping the explosion (white dispossession). The non-whites would remain, but their numbers could no longer be translated into political power.

Just to be clear, I am not arguing that people should not use the “demographics is destiny” argument. Like all such arguments, however, it is only true “if we do nothing.” But we need to know all the things that we can do to elude this “destiny.” Disenfranchisement is one of them.

To understand disenfranchisement, we need to make a distinction between “human rights” and “civil rights.” We have human rights simply as human beings. They are the same wherever we are on the planet. Civil rights, however, refer to rights within a specific political system. They are the rights of a citizen. One can take away civil rights, because they are created by political systems. But one cannot take away human rights, because we possess them by nature.

The right to vote is a civil right. One can enjoy the full protection of one’s human rights without having the right to vote in a particular society. For instance, this is true of children who are too young to vote. It is also true of foreign travelers and resident aliens.

Thus removing someone’s right to vote is perfectly consistent with respecting his human rights.

Now, I must make myself perfectly clear. I do not think this is the most desirable long-term solution for white demographic decline. In the long run, I want white ethnostates.

But in the short-term, disenfranchisement of non-whites would give whites some political breathing room to create white ethnostates.

Moreover, as I have argued in “Remigration Is Inevitable,” disenfranchisement is a necessary part of any process of remigration.

First, it is simply logical that if a society has made the momentous decision to physically separate itself from entire populations, such populations would no longer have the right to vote. Denaturalization logically entails disenfranchisement.

Second, remigration will take time. This means that after a white society has resolved on remigration, non-white citizens will remain within its borders. However, if one is serious about remigrating these people, it makes no sense to allow them to exercise political power in the meantime—political power that might, for instance, be used to overturn remigration.

Disenfranchisement would work. In fact it could work so well that it might undermine our ability to create ethnostates.

In effect, disenfranchisement could create white equivalents of the Gulf States. Native Qataris, for example, are 11 to 12% of Qatar’s population. The rest consists of guest workers from other countries who have no political power. In the United Arab Emirates, natives constitute about 11 to 15% of the population. The rest are foreign guest workers with no political power. Native Kuwaitis are 30 to 40% of Kuwait’s population, the rest being foreign nationals.

I regard such a society as dystopian. Basically, it is what white First-World countries would turn into if we maintained sub-replacement fertility, feminism, consumerism, oligarchy, and open borders, but simply abolished democracy for all newcomers. The only thing worse would be the same society in which the newcomers could vote.

As a White Nationalist, however, I regard all of these phenomena as symptoms of decadence. I want to cure us of them, not make them safe from the rising tide of color.

But White Nationalists already know we can never rest. We know that the masses are complacent and willing to accept half-measures and compromises. Thus as soon as we win one incremental victory like disenfranchisement, we know that we must simply move the goalposts closer to the ethnostate and keep agitating to take further steps in that direction.

But no matter what the ultimate outcome of disenfranchisement, it is necessary to halt white demographic decline. So disenfranchisement is desirable.

But is it possible?

Yes, it is.

The best way to prove something is possible is to show that it is actual. First of all, in the US no one under the age of 18 has the right to vote in federal elections. Second, in 48 out of 50 US states, if you are incarcerated for a felony, you lose your right to vote while you are in prison. (The exceptions are Maine and Vermont, plus Washington DC.) Furthermore, Americans can also lose their right to vote through being declared mentally incompetent or incapacitated. Finally, Americans can lose their right to vote simply by moving from one state to another. States have differing residency requirements before one can register to vote.

Beyond that, vast numbers of Americans disenfranchise themselves simply by not registering to vote. Estimates vary from 25 to 30% of people who are eligible to vote never bother to register. And even people who are registered to vote often choose not to exercise that right. In high-turnout elections, 20 to 25% of registered voters do not bother. In low-turnout elections, that number rises to 45 to 55%.

Yet all of these non-voting Americans still enjoy the same basic protections of their human rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Given that so many Americans who can vote choose not to, this makes a mockery of the liberal pretense that voting rights are somehow sacred.

Now let’s discuss disenfranchising the colored people.

These are policies that White Nationalists should adopt when we are in power. We should also encourage and applaud them before we have power, because they will make our work easier in the future.

America’s non-white population consists of citizens who have the franchise, and non-citizens who don’t. Citizens who enjoy the franchise can be divided into long-standing minorities and recently arrived ones. Remigration proposals deal with the recently arrived. It’s more complicated to repatriate longstanding minorities like the descendants of African slaves to their ancestral homelands. And indigenous minorities are already in their ancestral homeland. Thus the solution for these groups is to create sovereign homelands, or semi-autonomous reservations for small tribes.

Non-citizens are divided into legal and illegal residents. However, in some corrupt (viz Democrat) areas, non-citizens are allowed to vote.

The first thing to do is simply disenfranchise people who should not be voting anyway. (That would also include the dead.)

The second step is to halt the naturalization of all non-whites.

But what about the non-whites who already have the vote?

First, we should consider giving all citizens positive incentives to disenfranchise themselves. Many people choose not to vote because they wish to avoid the possibility of jury duty. Let’s give them other things to avoid.

• Let’s tie eligibility for the military draft to voting.

• Let’s tie receiving certain welfare benefits to renouncing one’s right to vote.

• One could give tax incentives to people who renounce the right to vote.

For the poor, we could exempt them from sales taxes. I also favor disenfranchising oligarchs by giving them exemptions from capital gains taxes. (More importantly, they would also become ineligible to donate money to campaigns.)

Second, we can build on existing forms of disenfranchisement.

• There is no reason to restore the voting rights of felons once they are paroled.

• We can also raise the minimum age to vote from 18 to 20 or 21.

• We can make it easier to declare people mentally incompetent or incapacitated and thus ineligible to vote.

• We can extend the period of required residency in a state before one is allowed to vote.

• We can also make voter registration automatically “sunset” after a certain period of time, thus requiring people to renew it. (This is a sensible policy in any case, since it prevents dead people from voting.)

• We can require legal identification documents to vote.

• We can end mail-in voting, since it is subject to fraud.

• We can require that voters have a permanent residence of some sort rather than sleeping under a bridge to disenfranchise the homeless.

All of these measures would disproportionately impact non-whites, which is why we support them.

Third, we can return to tried-and-true techniques of mass non-white disenfranchisement, which were pioneered in the American South in the Jim Crow era:

• Poll taxes (basically, a fee for registering to vote)

• Literacy tests (perhaps we could expand that to IQ tests)

• Gerrymandering: congressional district lines can be drawn to decrease the number of non-white elected officials. This is not a form of disenfranchisement per se, but it does dilute non-white power, so it should be applauded.

Third, we can create new techniques of disenfranchisement. For instance, it is perfectly reasonable to denaturalize recent immigrants (and their families, since we want to keep families together) if they violate the law, including immigration laws.

All of these techniques of disenfranchisement gradually chip away at non-white power. They are useful interim improvements. But we should never lose track of our ultimate goal: the restoration or creation of sovereign homelands for all white peoples.

That goal requires separation from non-white populations through remigration and/or territorial partition. Both of these paths entail denaturalization, and denaturalization entails disenfranchisement.

Thus we should not shy away from advocating disenfranchisement and pursuing it incrementally today.

On June 22, 2026, during an appearance on the Can’t Be Censored podcast, Tucker Carlson said “I’m out” of the Republican Party and there was “no chance” he would support them moving forward. The specific reason he gave is the catastrophic Iran War, which was fought for Israeli/Jewish interests, not American interests.

On July 1, 2026, the Columbia Journalism Review published an exclusive interview with Carlson. In it, Tucker announced “I’m going to help build a third party.” The party will be populist in nature, focused strictly on the common good of American citizens. Tucker also claimed that he has no personal desire to run as a candidate. But, of course, that doesn’t rule out the possibility that he will run out of duty.

What does this mean for white identity politics in America in the short term?

First, Trump’s collapsing poll numbers already heralded blue waves in 2026 and 2028. Given that populists and independents are moving away from Republicans, it is nice to see people building something they can move toward.

These voters need a home. They need a party that will uphold nationalism and populism, which is what the people want. Otherwise, these homeless voters will simply migrate back and forth between Republicans and Democrats, who have made an art of not giving voters what they want.

The people want sensible social conservatism plus an interventionist government that sides with the people against the rich and connected. The elites want social liberalism and oligarchical power. The Democrats pair the interventionist state with social liberalism. The Republicans pair social conservatism with oligarchy. When in office, the Democrats deliver more social liberalism than populism. When the Republicans are in power, they deliver more oligarchy than conservatism. Thus the two-party system increasingly serves elite preferences not populist preferences. Hence the current grotesque system: Left-wing oligarchy.

In the long run, a genuine national populist party could overturn this system and replace it with what the people want: Right-wing populism. Let’s hope Tucker’s new party amounts to something more than UFOs, Russian propaganda, conspiracist snake oil, and goofy talk about demons.

Second, Tucker’s plans and Trump’s collapsing poll numbers are signs that nationalist and populist ideas—our ideas—are spreading through the electorate.

Trump was elected because he promised to put America First, close our borders, deport millions of illegals, and not get involved in any new wars. He also promised elite accountability and transparency, at least in connection with the Epstein files. He broke all those promises.

Beyond that, he involved America in a shamelessly immoral war against Iran: a war fought for Israeli/Jewish interests, based on lies about weapons of mass destruction, and prosecuted in a flagrantly criminal manner.

Sadly, most Americans would quickly forgive all those things—or at least forget them—if the war ended swiftly with a victory. But the war was unwinnable, because Iran already possessed a deterrent superior to nuclear weapons: the power to tank the global economy by devastating the Gulf states and closing the Strait of Hormuz. The US military knew it. The cabinet knew it. Yet they failed to stop Trump from taking the plunge.

In the short term, we are facing a global recession or depression. In the long term, we will see the decline of the dollar as well as America’s reputation as a reliable strategic partner. Donald Trump led the American empire to its Waterloo. All due to a slavish inability to say “no” to Jews.

And given the depths of Trump’s betrayal, we still should not lose sight of the fact that the mainstream Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Mike Johnson, and Tom Cotton are even bigger traitors and warmongers.

As a White Nationalist, I see these as unforgivable betrayals. And, apparently, millions of voters agree enough to abandon Trump and the Republicans.

This is what I have been praying for.

So why, like St. Augustine praying that God grant him continence, am I thinking, “Not yet”?

This isn’t how I had hoped it would work out. I hoped that Trump would keep his promises, focus his limited political capital on closing the border, deporting the invaders, and reversing anti-white racism. I hoped that Trump would set Vance up to succeed as the next president. I hoped that a solid 20 years of prudent but persistent national populist rule would turn things around for America.

It was always a long shot. But it was better than the alternative: the return of the Left to power in 2026 or 2028: a return to DEI, racial insurrection, lawfare, and censorship. Imagine Keir Starmer’s Labour government, but browner, sassier, gayer, and more Marxist.

But it could get much, much worse.

Multiparty democracy presupposes the willingness to hand the loaded gun of state power to one’s political opponents from time to time, because you can trust them not to shoot you with it. Those days are gone in America, which means that multiparty democracy in America is coming to an end. The first party to ban the other will rule until the whole system collapses.

The Left clearly thinks that the Right is too dangerous to be allowed to return to power. They stole the 2020 election. They would have stolen the 2024 election if they could have gotten away with it. The next time they are in power, they will try to ban the opposition and impose a rainbow dictatorship.

Leftism will still destroy itself, but that’s no consolation if it destroys us first.

The only way for the Right to avoid this is to strike first, while they are in power, and ban the Left. But I can’t honestly say that I want the likes of Mike Johnson, Tom Cotton, and Lindsey Graham to rule unopposed. That would be like having Netanyahu ruling unopposed. We’ve just gotten a taste of what that would be like, for it is how we got into the Iran War in the first place.

Trump’s war has blown up his electoral coalition. We see it in the polls. We see it in Tucker’s defection. In the short term, that means the Left back in power. That means Trump’s good policies on closing the borders, deporting invaders, and rolling back DEI will be reversed. It means the ramping up of censorship and lawfare directed at the Right. And it may mean the end of the Right’s electoral chances in the future—any Right’s electoral chances, including Tucker’s new party.

So yes, I am glad to see Trump and the Republicans get their comeuppance. But punishing them, morally satisfactory though it may be, will not put us in power or fix America. Indeed, it may make those goals harder to attain.

There is always a time lag between changing ideas and changing policies. Our ideas are now powerful enough to tank the Republicans, but they are not yet powerful enough to put our people into power.

At this point, some on the Right are thinking: if only we could get Trump’s wayward voters to be satisfied with progress on immigration and DEI and forget about foreign policy.

In effect, that’s what I did when I voted for the Vance-Trump ticket.

I figured that Trump would have Netanyahu in his ear the whole time. But I hoped that Trump would say “no.” I hoped that if we could get through 10 years of MAGA rule without a major Jewish war, Jewish power would naturally decline to the point that such wars would no longer be possible, for the Baby Boom generation is starting to die off, and they are the most deluded and fervent Israel boosters.

I did not, however, believe that Trump would be stupid/crazy/evil enough to start a war with Iran. But if he did, I at least consoled myself with the thought that such a war—though monstrously immoral and stupid—would at least hasten the end of the American empire.

But now that the darkest predictions about Trump have been proven true, I can’t in good conscience argue that white Americans can make a drug deal with Jews: we go along with their wars, and in exchange, they allow us to get our country back. That was never going to work. There’s a new consensus hardening on the Right: With Jews, we lose. There’s no fighting it. There’s no denying it.

So what are we to do?

First, we need to accept responsibility—not for the mess we are in—but for getting out of it. In the end, only White Nationalists can create White Nationalism in America or anywhere else. It is natural to hope that center Right parties can implement some of our policy preferences. But not all of them. Not the most important ones. Thus, in the end, the burden was always on us.

Second, we must keep doing what works: changing minds, building institutions, and contesting for political power wherever possible. Let’s hope the collapse of MAGA will bring more people and resources our way.

Point three, however, is quite sobering: we will face a much more hostile political environment. Winter is coming again for white advocacy. We must do as much as possible to prepare ourselves, so the springtime belongs to us.

This talk was delivered at the Irish National Party Summer Conference on July 4th, 2026. I want to thank everyone who made this event possible.

This is my first visit to Ireland. I didn’t come to see the Cliffs of Moher, the Guinness Storehouse, the Book of Kells, the Ring of Kerry, or the Blarney Stone. I came to see the Irish National Party. I came to listen and learn from you, because in recent years, I’ve been very impressed by the Irish resistance to the Great Replacement.

But to listen and learn, I must speak. It is the price of admission. I’ve decided to do something dangerous. I’m going to talk about Irish nationalism. But don’t worry, even though I’m an American, I don’t think that watching a movie about Michael Collins makes me an expert on your politics. I simply wish to speak as an outsider about what looks to me like eight enviable advantages of Irish nationalism.

Ethnic nationalism is a very simple idea. The world will be a better place if each and every people has the right to its own sovereign homeland, where they can pursue their own way of life free from outside interference. Thus if you are losing your homeland to replacement migration, your duty is simple. You must close your borders and remigrate the colonists. Ireland is for the Irish. The invaders must go.

Stated this way, ethnic nationalism is a universal ideology. I believe this is completely defensible. Even though nationalist movements will be as different as their nations, the basic rationale for national self-determination is the same for all of them.

A simple, morally defensible message is best when we have small numbers, slim resources, and are fighting an uphill battle against powerful enemies. But still, many nationalist movements insist on increasing their burdens by linking national self-determination to extraneous concerns. Because of your history, however, Irish nationalists have fewer such temptations.

Point 1: Ireland Never Had an Empire.

As an ethnonationalist, I am an opponent of imperialism. Just because I am an American, I don’t defend American imperialism, although that’s the first reflex of a patriot. But ethnic nationalists in many white countries succumb to that reflex. I guess they call us reactionaries for a reason.

But that’s a danger.

First of all, imperialism is nothing to celebrate. It causes a host of political, cultural, and demographic problems. Every empire is created by leaders who are willing to kill a few of their own people to take the lands of strangers. Once an empire is established, it typically elevates collaborators among the conquered, who eventually fuse with the elite of the conquerors and then lord it over the common people who think the empire is “theirs.” Thus even at their height, empires allow the culture and genes of the conquered to alter the conquerors.

Ruling an empire is like riding a tiger. It’s perfectly safe. You must simply maintain control of the tiger, forever. But, since nothing lasts forever, sometimes the tiger ends up riding you. Thus Britain and France are now drowning in the Afro-Asiatic backwash of their empires. Increasingly, these invaders are dropping the pretense of “enriching” their former masters and admitting that they come for plunder and vengeance.

Second, imperialism causes intellectual problems as well. Many nationalists feel the need to defend bygone empires for two reasons. First, they feel national pride and nostalgia for them. Second, since guilty feelings about past empires lower white resistance to race replacement, shouldn’t we argue that empires were actually good things? (A better response is simply to say: Two wrongs don’t make a right. If imperialism is bad, then so is reverse imperialism.)

Defending imperialism is bad because it undermines our own case for self-determination. Beyond that, it is a barrier to international cooperation between White Nationalists.

There are two basic defenses of empire on the Right.

The first is that “might is right.” But if might is right, on what grounds can we complain about being subjugated and replaced in our own homelands? After all, the Left and the migrants have the whip hand now.

Imagine trying to enlist the sympathy of outside parties by chronicling the migrant rape gangs, then ending with, “But after all, might is right.” It is a strange doctrine for tiny, beleaguered minorities to espouse.

The second defense is that empires may have denied the self-determination of various peoples, but think of the comforts they provided: law and order, railways, canals, steamships, running water, flush toilets, vaccinations, longer lives, etc.

Imagine upholding such a value system and then arguing that your countrymen need to risk life and limb—or merely higher prices—for national self-determination.

Nostalgia for empire also creates awkward moments when English nationalists wish to cooperate with Irish nationalists, German nationalists with Polish nationalists, etc. When Hitler ravaged Poland, it may have been evil, but it wasn’t pointless. At least he envisioned some benefit for Germany. But I don’t see how verbally defending such policies today brings any benefit to any white nation. It is just pointless, self-indulgent, self-defeating behavior.

Not only was Ireland never an empire, Ireland spent centuries trying to get out of the British empire. I think this is a great advantage for Irish nationalists today.

First, you see our struggle more clearly: it is anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist. Today, every white nation is subjugated by an imperial global system. Every migrant is a colonist of that empire.

Second, a legacy of empire corrupts patriotism. Americans and Russians love their homeland conditionally, because it is great and powerful. The true patriot loves his homeland unconditionally. Be it ever so humble, he loves it just because it is his own.

Third, having fought to free yourselves from the British empire, the Irish should also have some immunity to “might is right” arguments. Eight centuries of foreign domination did not extinguish the sense that there is something evil about being ruled by foreigners for their interests at your expense.

Fourth, the lack of an empire deprives Ireland’s Third-World colonizers of the excuses used in Britain and France. They aren’t from your former colonies. You don’t owe them reparations for anything.

Yes, they are still here. Yes, they are still coming. But they aren’t coming because they have good arguments. Like locusts, they don’t need arguments. They come simply to take what is yours.

The arguments are meant for you, to get you to drop your defenses. But without appeals to colonialism and reparations, it is much harder for them to legitimize their presence in Ireland, which makes it easier for you to argue for their removal.

Indeed, for Irish nationalists, the anti-colonial arguments work for you, not against you.

Point Two: Ireland Was Never “A Nation of Immigrants.”

In America, we are told that we can’t have borders because we are “a nation of immigrants.” Spelled out fully, the “nation of immigrants” argument is: Because America was settled by very similar peoples from Europe (many of whom struggled against assimilation), America should open its borders to very different peoples from around the world (and not assimilate them, because that is contrary to the spirit of multiculturalism). What could possibly go wrong? This is a dumb argument, just on the face of it.

If anti-whites wish to justify the Third-World colonization of Ireland by reference to past episodes of white immigration, the only thing they can point to is the Ulster Plantation, the hostile act of a foreign empire to dispossess the Irish of their homeland. This is why it is brilliant to refer to today’s Third-World colonists as a new imperial “plantation.”

Anti-whites will say just about anything to justify the destruction of white nations. Since Ireland was never a “nation of immigrants,” some people argue for immigration because Ireland was in fact a “nation of emigrants.” The world welcomed Irish immigrants, so out of fairness, the Irish should welcome the world.

Let’s set aside the facts that many Irish emigrants were little more than slaves, and that they were not exactly welcome in the New World. The main problem with this argument is that the Irish of today are not the people who emigrated. They are the people who stayed in their homeland. Thus you are being told that, because your ancestors chose to remain in your homeland, justice requires that you now give it away. It’s almost cute—or it would be if it weren’t evil

Point Three: Ireland Knows Diversity Is Not a Strength.

Unlike America, it was never possible to depict Ireland as having always been a diverse, multicultural salad bowl. Within the lifetimes of many in this room, the main form of diversity in Ireland was between two genetically and culturally almost identical European peoples who hated each other enough to plant bombs in one another’s neighborhoods. Even a tiny amount of diversity gave rise to a host of troubles.

There is no depth of dishonesty and absurdity to which our enemies will not sink, but for me, the worst are politicians who piously eulogize the ancient tribal conflicts of the very similar peoples of the British Isles, then cheerfully welcome in Somalis and Pakistanis, because diversity is strength.

Point Four: Ireland’s Ethnic Identity Is Strong.

It is much easier to advocate ethnic nationalism in a society with a strong sense of ethnic identity. Redefining a nation in terms of “culture” and “values” only becomes tempting once one has thrown away the unity of blood.

Because Ireland has never had to assimilate large numbers of immigrants until recently, there’s never been much pressure to synthesize a fake Irish civic nationalism based on “values” like openness and tolerance, which mean openness to and tolerance of being replaced in one’s homeland.

Your people have a higher-than-average immunity to such nonsense, and that’s another advantage for Irish nationalism. In America, I can’t even convince White Nationalists that Americans constitute a distinct ethnic group.

Point Five: Ireland Has a Living Revolutionary Nationalist Tradition.

The most insidious argument for empire is the same one offered for globalization today: the loss of sovereignty will promote prosperity and peace. Everybody wants prosperity and peace. Only idealists and patriots prize national sovereignty over Last Man comforts. I think Irish nationalists have some advantages here too.

First of all, the proper response to the bourgeois argument is that those who sacrifice sovereignty for peace and plenty will end up with none of them in the end. In truth, the Great Replacement does not make us richer and more secure but the exact opposite. The swiftness of Ireland’s colonization and decline makes it easier for Irish nationalists to make this argument.

Second, only a little more than a century ago, Ireland was freed by men who put national sovereignty above comfort, security, and even life itself. This prodigious blood sacrifice has not been forgotten. You are much closer to your heroic revolutionary moment than we Americans, who are celebrating the 250th anniversary of our Declaration of Independence today. That too is an advantage for Irish nationalists.

Point Six: Ireland Doesn’t Have a Monarchy or Pretenders to a Throne.

Another advantage is your republicanism. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal,” he was simply affirming the republican principle that there is no hereditary right to rule. Jefferson did not think that heredity was unimportant. Nor did he think that all men were equally capable of ruling. But he rejected the idea that heredity was a reliable way to ensure that the best men rule. I agree with this.

Hereditary rule is wrong about two central issues of political philosophy: the nature of sovereignty and the nature of aristocracy, i.e., rule by the best.

Hereditary rule descends, ultimately, from the idea that a land and its people are simply property that can be passed on by inheritance. This is obviously incompatible with the classical idea of popular sovereignty. You can’t be sovereign if you are property: someone’s inheritance, someone’s dowry, someone’s source of revenue.

But can’t we reconcile monarchy with popular sovereignty? Not hereditary monarchy. Popular sovereignty means that the common good of the people is the highest law, the principle of political legitimacy.

If you take the common good seriously, then political office should be based on merit. But in a society of millions, how likely is it that the best man for any office is the firstborn son of the incumbent? And if he is, he deserves the job because of his qualifications, not his heredity. Any society that promotes based on merit will always have an advantage over those that promote based on heredity. That’s true in politics as well as business.

This isn’t necessarily an argument for abolishing ancient institutions. But it is an argument for depoliticizing them as much as possible: in effect, putting them in a museum. And indeed, most monarchies today are constitutional, meaning subject to popular sovereignty, and largely ceremonial.

Hereditary monarchy and aristocracy are glittering but empty simulacra of genuine aristocracy. Imagine feeling the need to defend the House of Windsor. You are lucky to be free of such baggage. I hope you build a genuinely aristocratic republic. You can begin by attracting the best people in your society to the Irish National Party. I think you are off to a good start.

Point Seven: Ireland Is Part of the Anglosphere.

As in Ukraine, Ireland’s colonizers imposed a foreign language. I fully understand the desire to decolonize one’s language. When Israel was founded, Hebrew was nobody’s mother tongue. They literally brought it back from the dead. If things had gone slightly differently a century ago, you all might be speaking Gaelic, and I would be looking very, very confused.

But English is your mother tongue, and even though you might regard it more as your evil-stepmother tongue, there are some consolations.

Speaking English makes it easier for you to communicate to the world at large. It makes it easier for the world to follow events in Ireland. It makes it easier for you to communicate and cooperate with nationalists in other countries. I have noticed that Nationalists in larger European nations like France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, are more linguistically insular than nationalists from small nations that have widely adopted English as the new lingua franca. Finally, English connects you to the world-wide Irish diaspora, most of whose ancestors left before Ireland became independent. These are advantages for Irish nationalists.

Yes, speaking only Gaelic would impede the influx of bad ideas and migrants. But such problems would persist if English remained your second language.

Point Eight: Ireland Has a Diaspora & Sympathizers Around the Globe.

There’s a strange phenomenon on the American Right that I call “telescopic ethnonationalism.” Americans like Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk seem to believe that America is a proposition nation, or at least they are unwilling to challenge that dogma. But they will defend ethnonationalist arguments for white people overseas: for South Africans, for Germans, for Irishmen.

If Elon Musk is willing to affirm Irish nationalism, just imagine what Irish Americans might be willing to do for you. Irish-American attachment to the old country is probably exceeded only by Jewish-American attachment to Israel. Irish nationalism has been fostered by the Irish diaspora since the nineteenth century. I hope you are benefiting from it today.

As globalism breaks down and ethnonationalism struggles to be born in America, I hope that Americans will sublimate some of their frustrated nationalist sentiments into support for the Irish cause. In a sense, that’s what I’m doing here today. I wish you the best. You are an inspiration to us all.

From the 2026 Counter-Currents Spring Retreat in Rome.

Scott Greer
Whitepill: The Online Right & the Making of Trump’s America
Los Angeles: Passage Press, 2026

Scott Greer’s Whitepill is a well-written insider’s account of two triumphs—of populism and Right-wing metapolitics—that have reshaped American conservatism. Greer’s protagonist is the “online Right,” which basically means a constellation of webzines, blogs, and video and social media channels defending forms of populism and white identity politics, while attacking both the Left and the mainstream Right. The story of these triumphs is the “whitepill” of Greer’s title, which is internet slang for good news.

Greer also chronicles the defeat of one form of online Right-wing metapolitics, namely the Alt Right, which failed when it tried to come offline and become actual politics. The backdrop of the whole tale is the political career of Donald Trump.

Scott Greer is the ideal person to write this book. He’s a political journalist with an eye for concrete details that illustrate larger political issues. He had a front-row seat on the events he narrates, with one foot in the American conservative movement and another in the Alt Right.

Scott Greer arrived in Washington D.C. in early 2013. He began working at the Leadership Institute, where Kevin Deanna (a.k.a. Gregory Hood and James Kirkpatrick) previously worked. Greer fell in with the colorful D.C. Alt-Right circle, which, in addition to some very fine people, also included “a heroin addict with sociopathic tendencies, an unstable taxi driver who couldn’t control his racial outbursts, and one likely federal agent who tried to recruit us into a militia” (p. 87). But surely the worst character was Katie McHugh, a scene groupie who, when she finally washed out, doxed him and wrecked his mainstream career.

From 2014 to 2015, Greer wrote for and edited Richard Spencer’s Radix webzine. He also worked for The Daily Caller. In 2017, Greer published No Campus for White Men: The Transformation of Higher Education into Hateful Indoctrination (World Net Daily Books). After leaving The Daily Caller, Greer worked for a conservative public relations firm and began writing another book with the support of a Robert Novak Fellowship. But in 2018, he was doxed for his association with Radix, fired from his job, stripped of his fellowship, denounced by his former colleagues, and cast into the wilderness, where he has been trying to relaunch his promising career as a conservative journalist.

Since then, Greer’s primary platforms have been Twitter/X, Substack (where he has a newsletter, Highly Respected), and Revolver News, edited by Right-wing Jew and fellow doxing victim Darren Beattie. Recently, Greer began writing for The American Conservative. This is a positive sign that mainstream conservative platforms are shifting towards a greater openness to white identity politics. But opposition on the Left is undiminished. Thus when two of Greer’s American Conservative columns were reprinted by The Washington Post, they were removed due to kvetching about his dox. Whitepill is clearly part of Greer’s comeback plan.

Greer sets the stage for the emergence of the online Right with a description of mainstream Republican thinking on immigration and national identity. It was overwhelmingly awful. Republicans were committed to amnesty, open borders, and civic nationalism, which basically means: white Americans are fungible with any featherless biped who will swear an oath to American “values.”

This Republican consensus has been completely overthrown, largely due to the confluence of two factors: the online Right and the candidacy of Donald Trump.

Greer also devotes a chapter to the increasing racial polarization and political correctness of the Obama years.

We’ve come a long way since then.

These chapters are necessary to Greer’s argument, because he can’t argue that things have gotten better without establishing just how bad things were. Compared to where White Nationalism was in the year 2000, we’ve made enormous progress. This is easy to forget, given the immense censorship, deplatforming, and harassment we have endured. It is also easy to forget when measured against what we need to do to save our race. Moreover, compared to earlier Republicans, Donald Trump is an enormous improvement. It is also easy to lose sight of this fact, because when compared to what is required to save America, Trump is a major disappointment.

According to Greer, “The Right today bears little resemblance to what I first encountered in 2013, in large part due to the triumph of the pseudonymous world (where I worked in secret) over the established institutions (where I was building my career)” (p. 8).

Greer emphasizes that the online Right was both populist (“a bottom-up revolt,” p. 5) and metapolitical, i.e., about spreading ideas and networking, both of which took place largely online.

What is the relationship between the Alt Right, which features prominently in Greer’s narrative, and the “online Right”? The Alt Right is a current of the online Right, which existed before the Alt Right and carried on after its demise. Between the middle of 2015 and the end of 2017, the Alt Right was the biggest current of the online Right.

The main issues of the Alt Right were white identity politics, America-first nationalism, popular sovereignty, traditional family values, and freedom of speech. The Alt Right opposed anti-whiteness, globalization, immigration, feminism, multiculturalism, and political correctness. These are the central issues of the online Right today.

What is the relationship of the Alt Right with White Nationalism? The phrase “alternative Right” was coined by Paul Gottfried in a talk to the H. L. Mencken Club in November of 2008. It first appeared online at Taki’s Magazine (then edited by Richard Spencer) in December of 2008.

Richard Spencer launched AlternativeRight.com in early 2010 with start-up money from William H. Regnery II. Regnery was the founder of The Occidental Quarterly, which is a White Nationalist publication. TOQ is both race-realist and discusses the so-called “Jewish question.” In America, TOQ is the standard of White Nationalist metapolitical orthodoxy.

But Regnery wasn’t interested just in orthodoxy. He was also interested in outreach. Thus he founded the H. L. Mencken Club as an outreach organization for White Nationalism, basically a forum where people who were not White Nationalists could interact with those who were.

Regnery founded Alternativeright.com for the same reason, with the same formula. Like the Mencken Club, Spencer’s webzine welcomed many different strands of Rightist thought, but its goal was to promote White Nationalism.

Alternativeright.com got off to a strong start, but after a year, Spencer seems to have lost interest in the project. Eventually, Colin Liddel and Andy Nowicki took over editing the site. Then, Spencer shut it down at the end of 2013 and launched a new webzine called Radix.

The term “Alternative Right” stuck around, however, because it was useful. It created a discursive space where different factions of the Right and the public in general could encounter our ideas. It allowed people to flirt with elements of White Nationalism while maintaining plausible deniability. Thus I used the term at Counter-Currents, as did many of my writers.

From 2012 to 2014, the online Right got a lot bigger due to the confluence of four factors: the Left-Right polarization among libertarians after Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign, the protests and moral panics coalescing around fake black martyrs like Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the growth of the “manosphere,” and the “Gamergate” controversy. Many new people discovered Counter-Currents and other White Nationalist platforms around this time, and they stayed, because white identity politics made sense to them.

At the beginning of 2015, a new political movement had clearly emerged. White identity politics was at the core of it, including biological race realism. The manosphere also played an important role, because biological sex differences were just as salient and just as powerfully explanatory as biological race differences.

The Jewish question was certainly discussed. But it wasn’t central. There was an anti-liberal element to the new synthesis, but this too was not universal, especially given the massive recent influx of libertarians. Populism was also in the mix, but there were many elitist elements influenced by Nietzsche, Evola, and even the Neo-Reactionaries, another form of the online Right. Nationalism, of course, was part of the conversation. But there were anti-nationalist strands as well. Finally, National Socialism was inevitably in the mix, but it was by no means dominant.

I was a member of the private forum that had given rise to The Right Stuff website and its podcast The Daily Shoah. In early 2015, there was a debate about what to call this new movement. Many favored the “Alt Right.” I defended this choice. A few opposed it, largely because they associated it with Richard Spencer, who was generally seen in TRS circles as a pompous fool. But in the end, “Alt Right” won out, because it was short, made a good hashtag, and was suitably vague. Opposition to Spencer also melted over time, because in the land of the anonymous, even a pompous fool can be king, as long as he is willing to put his face out there.

I was perfectly content with Counter-Currents being an “Alt Right” platform, because that provided us with an audience and a set of questions for intellectual exploration and debate, debates I was confident that we could win.

I remember at the beginning of June 2015 looking down from my lofty metapolitical perch and feeling rather bored with American politics. I wondered what new horrors the Republicans had in store for us. A Jeb Bush-Marco Rubio ticket? Or maybe Paul Ryan and Eric Cantor? The extreme-Right specter of Ted Cruz?

Then Donald Trump declared his candidacy for president while rejecting the establishment consensus that immigration, globalization, and multiculturalism were sacrosanct. Until Trump came on the scene, no decent politician would compete on these issues, since doing so was seen as pandering to the lowest forms of populism, nationalism, and racism.

The whole Alt Right was jolted awake. Practically everyone I knew coalesced around supporting Trump’s candidacy. The Republican base also loved Trump, because American voters want patriotism, sensible social conservatism, non-interventionism, and a state that will side with the masses against the rich and connected. We want national populism, in other words, and Trump was offering it in a blunt and brutal style that trampled on the speech codes and fake civility of the political establishment, both Left and Right. In the first debate, when Trump uttered the words, “Only Rosie O’Donnel,” I knew he was going to be America’s next president.

The establishment hated Trump, including the Republican establishment and Conservatism Inc. He was a traitor to his class. This is the point at which Trump and the Alt Right came together to change the American Right.

On every platform where we were allowed, the Alt Right defended Trump from all comers. We had better arguments, better rhetoric, and better memes. And although we certainly were not nice people, we got credit for brutal frankness about taboo topics. We were also damned funny, another mark of superiority. If you can laugh at the system, you’ve already risen above it. We laughed at our enemies as we ground them into the dirt.

Did the Alt Right “meme Trump into the White House”? We have no proof of that. But we certainly helped. In every forum in which we could combat the Republican establishment, Trump won out. Even former Never Trumpers like Glenn Beck, Brent Bozell, Dana Loesch, and Megyn Kelley came around. Was it because of our arguments? Maybe. If they were paying attention, they certainly heard us, or people who were influenced by us.

However, in all places where conventional Republican ideas could not be challenged, Trump was stymied. I am thinking here primarily of staffing the administration. The great failure of Trump’s first term is that he allowed conventional Republicans to make his staffing decisions. If national populists who shared Trump’s vision were given jobs in the administration, Trump’s first term might have been much more satisfying.

In short, where the Alt Right could be heard, Trump won out. Where we could not be heard, Trump was blocked. Thus I conclude that, yes, the populist metapolitical insurgency of the Alt Right helped Trump win the White House.

To be more precise, the American people put Trump in the White House, because Trump offered the people what they want, for a change. The Alt Right’s main role was to beat back anti-Trump elite opinion.

This is why Trump and the Alt Right were branded threats to liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is the art of not giving the people what they want. Liberal democracy means minority rule, i.e., elite rule. Trump was the candidate of the people, not the elites. And the Alt Right were his intellectual bodyguard and shock troops.

Greer is absolutely right to point out that just as the Alt Right helped Trump, Trump helped us. He dramatically increased our visibility and relevance. He dramatically accelerated the breakdown of the system.

But it is also important to recognize that we could have done it without him. Those who don’t recognize this fact will cling to Trump long after they should discard him. And my sense is that Trump is long past his discard date.

I operate on the assumption that white Americans basically want what we want. Yet the preferences of the masses do not triumph politically because of an illegitimate system—which includes the media, the education system, and the culture industry—ultimately founded on a fake moral dogma: Identity politics (i.e., racism) is the worst thing in the world—but only for white people.

Our job was to chip away at this dogma while creating counter-elites and counter-institutions. The goal is to “wake up” people, overthrow the system that oppresses them, and create a system that represents their authentic interests.

It was a clash of ideas and elites. Our ideas would beat their ideas. Our elites would defeat their elites.

But history isn’t just a clash of ideas and elites. It is a realm of the contingent and unpredictable. The best ideas and organizations in the world can fail if contingent historical circumstances are not right.

But you can’t plan the contingent and unpredictable. By definition, you can’t predict the unpredictable. You can only plan for such things, i.e., be open to them and prepared to exploit them.

In 2015, two contingencies benefitted White Nationalism enormously: the European migrant crisis and the Trump candidacy.

Trump was the sort of wild card that we had long been praying for. All around the white world, a pattern became familiar: an ordinary person, sometimes a minor elected official, would say the “wrong” thing about race and immigration, then he would be attacked, forced to apologize, and finally destroyed anyway by the establishment.

In 2014, I actually floated in our circles the Stand Your Ground Project. What if our movement had the ability to help such people before they apologized and backed down? What if a compelling young lawyer could contact such a person within a few hours of the story breaking, explain to him what will happen, convince him of the futility of backing down, and persuade him to stand his ground?

Since I believe that our system is fundamentally fragile—ruled by idiots and held together by lies and fear and duct tape—even one person standing his ground publicly could be a turning point. Especially if that figure were already famous, too big to destroy, and not intimidated by the media. You can see where this is going.

Trump turned out to be that guy.

Trump’s most enduring achievement so far has been metapolitical. He broke the establishment consensus about what issues and opinions were politically permissible:

But the Alt Right played a huge role in this metapolitical realignment. Trump put these issues in play. But Trump is not particularly articulate, consistent, or deep. And without people like us to fill in Trump’s thoughts, explain their rationale, and beat down his opposition, his political heresies would have been ephemeral.

After the 2016 election, the Alt Right self-destructed.

In the months running up to the election, tensions emerged between the Alt Right and the so-called Alt Lite, i.e., social media influencers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich who liked the energy and moniker of the Alt Right but were hostile to anything that smacked of White Nationalism. They also had large audiences.

This produced a panic in Alt Right circles. People were afraid that the movement would be “coopted” by half-baked civic nationalists. Basically, the debate was between people who wanted to drive out the Alt Lite and the people who saw them as a sign that our influence was growing. Greer describes this conflict as follows:

This strikes me as inaccurate in two ways. First, Greer mischaracterizes my position. I was one of the people who was arguing against “purging” the Alt Lite. Aside from the fact that one can’t “purge” someone from the internet, I viewed the Alt Right as a tool for White Nationalist outreach and entryism, which was its whole point from the start. Thus I argued that:

I did, however, oppose the people who believed that a “big tent” meant not criticizing people like Milo. You can’t run a metapolitical outreach movement if you are unwilling to state and defend your own ideas. That’s a far cry, however, from threatening your opponents with “gas chambers,” “bogs,” and “woodchippers.”

Throughout history, intellectual salons have been the incubators of radical ideas. And one of the hallmarks of these salons is that they were a space in which different ideological tendencies could meet and debate in a pleasant and collegial atmosphere. I saw the Alt Right as an intellectual salon, not an ideologically rigid, hierarchical, would-be totalitarian political movement.

Second, Greer is surely right about Richard Spencer when he started Alternativeright.com. But something had changed by 2016, because the Spencer I remember forced a polarization between the Alt Right and the Alt Lite in an event that came to be known as “Hailgate,” which led me to write the obituary for the Alt Right “brand.”^[2] Spencer then went on a campaign to centralize the Alt Right and purge it of people who did not look up to him. The result was a small bunker, not a big tent.

Greer’s account of the downfall of the Alt Right is depressingly accurate. There were two related problems. First, the Alt Right was working beautifully as a metapolitical movement. But some people tried to turn it into a political movement. This led to disasters like Charlottesville. Second, the drive to turn the Alt Right into a political movement came largely from people who wanted to resurrect National Socialism.

This struck me as entirely perverse. We were already fighting an uphill battle to save America. Why burden ourselves with Hitler and the Holocaust? I was perfectly content for such people to circulate in our salon, but when we were actually beginning to make metapolitical headway, I thought dwelling on interwar fascism to be self-defeating.

If Greer ended his story with the Alt Right, this book should have been called Blackpill. It is embittering to contemplate where we would be today without predictable, preventable disasters like Hailgate and Charlottesville.

But Greer takes a broader historical perspective. At the beginning of the book, he showed us how bad things were in the pre-Trump era. Having interred the Alt Right, Greer then shows us how much better things have gotten: “From a distance, it can appear as though the Alt-Right won, even if the New Right that has emerged from it has set aside the movement’s early fantasies and excesses” (p. 13). “National identity and demographics would come to dominate the political conversa­tion. The issues the Alt-Right had fixated on did not die when the Alt-Right imploded” (p. 150).

Among the positive developments are the red-pilling of Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, and Elon Musk; the mainstreaming of the Great Replacement, white identity politics, and “national divorce”; and the return of Trump to power with a much more serious administration (before he self-destructed).

True, all of it falls short when measured by what we need to save America. But it is also true that we are far better off than we were before the Trump era.

Moreover, our line seems to be going up from here:

Yes, there have been some bitter defeats. But overall, we are winning more battles than we are losing, with no sign of stopping or even slowing down. And that, as the book says, is truly a whitepill.

[1] See Greg Johnson, “White Nationalism, the Alt Right, & the Alt Lite,” Counter-Currents, January 4, 2017.

[2] Greg Johnson, “The Alt Right: Obituary for a Brand?,” Counter-Currents, November 29, 2016.

One of the most fundamental distinctions in politics is between leadership and pandering. Failing to understand this distinction can lead to disaster. Leadership and pandering have the same object: the people, or more specifically the politically empowered people, the electorate. Leadership and pandering also have the same goal: to harvest political power from the people, primarily through elections.

How do leadership and pandering differ?

At any given time, the people have a set of beliefs and preferences: an understanding of what’s real and desirable, what’s right and wrong. Let’s just call these “given ideas” or “given preferences.” Leadership and pandering are two attitudes toward these “givens.”

If your goal is simply power, the best way to get it is to appeal to as many people as possible. The best way to do that is to conform your message to the given ideas and preferences of the electorate.

But what if the electorate is wrong? That doesn’t really matter if your goal is power. What if you personally disagree with the electorate? Again, your personal convictions don’t really matter if your goal is power. Thus you should keep your convictions private and pretend to agree with the public.

Pursuing power by setting aside one’s own beliefs and pretending to share the illusions and follies of the masses is my definition of pandering.

Pandering also happens in the economic realm. You can grow very rich my setting aside your tastes and pandering to the tastes of the masses.

What about politicians or businessmen who are wholly in step with the given ideas and preferences of the public? You can’t really call them panderers. There’s an element of condescension and self-betrayal to pandering. At least that’s what’s being asked of us when pandering is recommended as a path to wealth and power.

How do we define leadership? The simplest definition of a leader is someone who organizes a group and conducts them from point A to B.

Political leaders can be in complete accord with the given ideas and preferences of the public. In a way, this is the ideal leader. But a perfect servant of the people is ideal only if the people themselves require no improvement. If the people are unhealthy, however, then a statesman who merely serves them is making them worse off. But he isn’t pandering, because he doesn’t know any better.

The more people have in common, the more comfortable they are socializing with one another. But a different model should apply to professional and political relationships. When you get sick, you go to a doctor who knows more about medicine than you do. When you get your hair cut, you go to a barber who can do it better than you. That’s simply rational. Likewise, it is rational to want political leaders who are better at politics than you.

That difference opens up the possibility of leadership as well as pandering. I will call political leadership that makes people better edifying, because it builds people up by changing bad ideas into better ideas, bad preferences into better ones.

Edifying leaders can and do exist. But they are very rare in democracies, because in democracies, the path to political power is catering to the given ideas and preferences of the electorate, not trying to improve them. Indeed, in a democracy, people feel insulted by the suggestion that they need to improve their ideas and values. They much prefer candidates who flatter them with the message that they are perfect just the way they are.

The only superiority that people gladly suffer in democratic political leaders is merely a matter of skill, which basically means: the technical ability to satisfy given preferences.

That’s why White Nationalists don’t make much headway in electoral politics. Most people don’t want what we want—or at least they don’t think they do. To change their minds, we must edify them, not pander to them. Basically, we must convince them that every people has the right to its own homeland; that they are losing their homelands to diversity, multiculturalism, and immigration; and that they must take their own sides in ethnic conflicts—including closing borders and remigration—if they wish to have a future again. “This land is ours. Invaders and colonizers must go back.”

But is changing people’s minds about these sorts of issues best done in a democratic political campaign? Is a political speech enough to undo decades of school, television, movies, and pop songs all celebrating diversity and tolerance? Probably not. Thus the electorate needs to be educated before we can even hope to reap power from them.

The kind of education that must come before political campaigns is called “metapolitics,” which just means “before politics.” We must awaken in the public the same longing we feel for community, order, and beauty. Once people want what we want, we can lead them there politically.

We’ve made tremendous metapolitical progress, especially in the last decade, which is why political parties supporting elements of our agenda are taking off. But metapolitical work can never stop. Political work must simply be added on.

But can we meet the public halfway? This is the argument for “mainstreaming” our position. The answer is: yes and no. We need to make another distinction here, this one between substance and style. Substance refers to our basic principles and ultimate goals. Style refers to how we communicate them. No, we cannot meet people halfway on matters of substance, but yes, we can do that on matters of style.

The substance of White Nationalism is to create or restore white homelands for all white peoples. Either we have a right to our own homelands or we don’t. There is no halfway point between the right to a homeland and multiculturalism/globalism. There’s no way to split the difference. It’s all or nothing. Either we stand up for our fundamental principles or we don’t. Compromising on fundamental principles is simply self-defeating.

However, I am all for meeting the public halfway—or even more than halfway—on matters of style. The principle we should follow is the Latin maxim suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. This means that we should be as supple and pragmatic and persuasive as possible in our style of communication, in our outreach, in our propaganda. But we should be unbending and uncompromising about our essential basic principles.

Our goal is to make the public like us in terms of fundamental principles, by making ourselves more relatable to the public in terms of style.

Elitists love to accuse populists of “pandering.” That’s because they feel that ethnic identity and preference are hideous vices that should not be tolerated. These are the same people who happily give needles to addicts. Leftists think it is progress to replace a patriot with a junkie.

People who share a lot in common are more comfortable around each other. Thus they gravitate toward leaders with a common touch, a populist style. They are attracted to leaders with whom they can identify. This often works against us, but we should not disdain it. After all, it is an expression of our own deep desire for community and identity. It is the core of what we want. Thus we must build on it. This is the opposite of pandering. For us, populism is not just a matter of style but of substance.

But there’s no contradiction between populism and edifying leadership. This brings us to another distinction: between what the public really wants and what they think they want at any given moment. We believe that identity is the root of politics. People have a deep longing for community. But at any given moment, they also long for cheap goods and thrills, even though such economic motives open the door for globalism and rootlessness.

One of our central metapolitical tasks is to convince people that such economic motives must bow to communal needs whenever they conflict. And once in power, populist politicians must be willing to say “no” to the economic arguments for globalism, which leads straight to perdition. But we must say, “No, you only think you want that. But that’s not what you really want. For these reasons . . .”

Life is full of decisions. Principles are how we make them. We are constantly faced with the choice to edify or pander. The temptation to pander is always strong when economic motives intervene. This is especially problematic for the nationalist Right, since many of us have classical liberal backgrounds and some of those assumptions linger on. All too many of us think that things must be going well if money is flowing in.

Moreover, economic temptations to pander are everywhere, because so much of the populist Right is an online take-selling operation. If you want a distinction between true populism and cynical “slopulism,” it is simply this: whenever one is forced to choose between advancing our cause or simply pleasing the public, the true populist chooses the edifying upward path, while the slopulist panders to fill his pockets.

Dear Vice President Vance,

Since this is an open letter, please indulge me as I spell out some things that you surely know but which some readers may not.

Donald Trump has done the impossible. He has created a global humanitarian and political crisis, yet he has managed to get most of the world to tune it out simply by lying about it continually. Trump has now announced that a “deal” with Iran is imminent 39 times. This is what Steve Bannon called “flooding the zone with bullshit.”

The only reason to take the latest announcement seriously is that Iran and Pakistan are also speaking about it. They, at least, have some credibility.

Every intelligent person knew what would happen if the United States tried and failed to overthrow the Iranian regime. Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, creating shortages and price spikes in oil, natural gas, fertilizers, and other crucial industrial commodities, which would create economic hardship and political instability all over the world, including the United States.

What we didn’t know is how effectively Iran could retaliate against American bases, Israel, and the Gulf states. But, in all fairness, they did warn us. Trump just chose to ignore them. After all, his warnings are mostly hollow.

We also didn’t know the extent to which America’s agreements to defend the Gulf states were bluffs. The US simply can’t sustain a strategy of countering swarms of cheap Iranian drones by firing off gold-plated missiles.

When faced with shortages of interceptors, the US showed the world what a feckless ally it is. When interceptors became scarce, Washington immediately prioritized Israel over the Gulf and the Gulf over the Far East.

The Gulf states quickly learned that lesson. They turned to Ukraine for anti-drone defense technology. If they were smart—and they are smart enough—they also began secretly negotiating with Iran. They have now become Iran’s de-facto allies in seeking a swift end to the war.

Once the war is over and rebuilding commences, the Gulf states will surely reevaluate the petrodollar. In exchange for American protection, the Gulf states agreed to price petroleum exports in dollars. For half a century, this has allowed the US to maintain solvency while running up enormous debts. Without the petrodollar system, the US will end up paying much more to service its national debt, forcing it either to cut spending or devalue the dollar.

How does one win a war? By coming out more powerful in the end.

Iran won this war. Iran will emerge from this war as the regional hegemon, with control of the Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf states will align themselves with Iranian policy in the region. That will be good for Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Palestinians, and very bad for Israel.

The US lost the war. The US failed to destroy the Iranian regime. It failed to protect its allies and client states. America failed not just in the Gulf, but globally, because its expensive, high-tech arsenal has proven no match for cheap drones and rockets. It also failed globally by demonstrating that it will sacrifice its obligations to other allies and clients to protect Israel at all costs, because Israel First. Finally, losing the petrodollar will significantly weaken America long after Gulf exports are restored.

Iran is not the only winner of this war. The biggest winner is probably China, which is really the only global rival America should care about. China became more powerful simply by staying out of the fight while America punched itself in the face repeatedly.

This is pretty much the worst-case scenario for the war. Trump started the war because he chose to believe the best-case scenario: quick, clean regime change after killing Ayatollah Khamenei and other senior regime leaders (under a flag of truce).

There was virtually no chance that this scenario would work. It was stewed up with bogus intelligence by the Israelis, who wanted America to destroy Iran and don’t particularly care about the political and humanitarian costs to non-Jews, i.e., most of the planet.

Everyone in Trump’s cabinet knew better. But Trump chose to listen to the leader of a foreign country who wanted war with Iran and does not care about America’s long-term interests. You all swore oaths to serve America’s interests. But none of you had the guts to stop this disaster.

Countless deaths and untold suffering were caused by people looking at a bogus plan and thinking, “It sounds terrible, but the guy next to me seems to think it will work, so let’s hope for the best. Besides, rocking the boat will be bad for my career.” Unfortunately, the guy next to him was thinking the very same thing. And so on, all around the table.

This blend of stupidity, wishful thinking, cowardice, and putting personal interest ahead of the common good is at the root of most political disasters.

The Iran War began 107 days ago. It should have been clear that the war was lost by the end of the second week.

What’s worse than losing a war in two weeks? Prolonging it by more than three months because of Trump’s psychological inability to admit defeat.

The world has suffered three needless months of death, anxiety, and compounding economic and political instability, while Trump hoped and prayed, lied and coped, blustered and retreated—in front of the whole world, no less, on Truth Social—in the insane hope that this time, doing the same thing would produce a different result.

Trump is clearly a pathological narcissist. He is literally willing to let millions suffer rather than admit that he made a serious mistake. He must maintain a positive self-image at all costs (to others).

He’s also an abusive narcissist who enjoys creating fear, tension, and drama around him.

In fairness to Trump, he’s probably also just terrified to say no to the Jewish war lobby.

These are not traits of a good leader.

Why have you allowed this evil to fester for more than three months?

As with the Iraq War, the Iran War was simply Israel activating its American golem to destroy one of its enemies with fake weapons of mass destruction as the pretext.

Trump is clinging to this pretext with white knuckles. For Israel, all this suffering is easy to justify: Iran is an enemy, and non-Jewish lives mean nothing. For Americans, however, such suffering could only be justified by warding off nuclear war.

But at this point, all talk of Iran getting a nuclear weapon is moot. The primary purpose of nuclear weapons is to deter regime change, and Iran has shown that it already has the conventional means to destroy the Gulf and crash the global economy. Any continued talk of the Iranian nuclear threat is just pandering to the adult diaper demographic who watch Fox News.

What’s dumber than starting another war over fake weapons of mass destruction? Trump’s latest peace plan, in which the United States will be paying $300 billion (basically, $1,000 per American) to bribe Iran not to build nuclear weapons that it wasn’t building in the first place and that it no longer needs to deter regime change, since it now has conventional means.

$300 billion because Trump tore up Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran after chimping for years over Obama returning a mere $400 million of Iran’s money.

That's $300 billion plus returning $24 billion in Iran's own money, plus the tens of billions spent on the war itself, plus untold billions in damage to the Gulf, plus untold trillions of damage to the global economy.

If paying tribute to Iran for peace has a “late empire” vibe, that’s because the Byzantines paid the Persians an enormous tribute for the Treaty of Eternal Peace in 532. This peace lasted less than eight years. The next war was concluded in 545 with another massive bribe. Then, in 562, the Byzantines signed the Fifty-Year Peace with Persia, along with more tribute. Shockingly, this peace did not last either, so new truces (and massive payments) had to be negotiated in 574–575.

Not to be outdone by the Byzantines, Trump should call this the Golden Treaty of Perpetual Eternal Peace.

I honestly don’t care about the American empire or the petrodollar, although I had hoped they could have been wound down in a more orderly and dignified fashion.

The reason I voted for the Vance-Trump ticket in 2024 is that (1) you weren’t Harris-Walz and (2) I had some hope that a new Trump administration could save America: close the borders, begin mass deportations, end anti-white policies, and start rolling back Leftist power in politics, academia, business, the media, the culture industry, the churches, etc.

Trump didn’t really know what needed to be done. But I hoped people around him did, which is why I specifically voted for Vance-Trump.

I hoped we would have four years of Trump with a Republican Congress just to get started, followed by eight years of Vance, followed by eight years of someone reliable. (Anyone but Rubio.) Twenty years of patient, diplomatic, but unrelentingly radical reform might have reversed the decline. It was always a long shot, but anyone who pulled it off would enjoy eternal glory.

The biggest impediment to saving America is now Donald Trump. Trump will always have sycophants, cultists, and shills. But there aren’t enough of them to save America.

Trump won because of voters who wanted peace, mass deportations, accountability for the Epstein class, and a rollback of Leftist insanity. Trump betrayed them. They won’t come back to him.

Even if Trump finally ends this war, the world may breathe a sigh of relief, but he deserves no thanks for belatedly stopping a war he should never have started.

If the Iran War really is over, that just frees Trump to blunder into another disaster.

He should be removed from office. He’s unfit for office. He’s acting crazy. He needs to go.

He needed to go a long time ago. With each day that decision is deferred, the costs grow and the benefits diminish.

My friend James O’Meara summed up the problem brilliantly with a quote from Nicholas von Hoffman, who got himself fired from 60 Minutes during the Watergate crisis for comparing Richard Nixon to “a dead mouse on the kitchen floor.” What Hoffman said applies to Trump:

The people who put Trump in office will rally to a candidate who will deliver peace, prosperity, borders, remigration, accountability, and sanity. If it isn’t you, it will be someone else. Naturally, you’d have an advantage over other contenders in 2028 if you are already president.

You know what’s coming if Trump stays in office: a blue wave in the midterms; gridlock, impeachment, and chaos; and a Leftist president in 2028. This is why you’re talking about not running. This is why Peter Thiel is decamping to Argentina. I’d lay odds that Elon Musk will follow if the Left returns to power with a vengeance.

Unfortunately, most Americans cannot run away. Many of them elected you to look out for their interests.

Frankly, I am hoping you’ll stay at your post. I am hoping that you’ll take action to save your nation and your skin. Basically, your only chance is to convince 2/3 of Trump’s cabinet to back his removal under the 25th Amendment.

It shouldn’t be hard. The alternative for all of you is to hand the loaded gun of state power back to the Democrats in two years, then hope and pray they won’t shoot you with it.

It was wishful thinking and cowardice that got us into this mess. It will take realism and courage to get us out.

Ibram X. Kendi
Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age
New York: One World, 2026

Ibram X. Kendi’s Chain of Ideas is on the Great Replacement, which he describes as “the most dominant political theory of our time” (p. xxx).

Kendi is one of America’s most prominent skintellectuals. His 2017 book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Bold Type Books, 2017) made him the youngest author ever to win the National Book Award for non-fiction. His 2019 book How to Be an Anti-Racist (New York: One World, 2019) was lauded by The New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” GQ magazine—which knows something about intellectuals—has called Mr. Kendi “preternaturally wise,” like Plato but black.

Kendi received a Ph.D. in African American Studies at Temple University. After teaching at several institutions, most notably Boston University, he is now the Carter G. Woodson Endowed Chair in History at Howard University, where he is Director of the university’s Institute for Advanced Study.

Chain of Ideas is Kendi’s tenth book. It is the first that I have read. Given Kendi’s accolades and bestsellers, I had assumed that he must at least be slick and plausible. But no. This book is astonishingly poorly argued and unconvincing. It is also astonishingly prolix: 550 pages, minus the notes. According to Kendi, the “enormity” (p. xv) of his note section forced him to make them available only online.

To say hare-brained things at such length is impossible without an awe-inspiring lack of self-awareness. Indeed, Ibram X. Kendi appears to be that bane of civilization: the energetic, hard-working crank.

But who could blame Kendi for thinking he’s cleverer than he really is? After all, he’s been praised to the skies—mostly by white liberals—and lavishly rewarded for his ideas. Indeed, the dustjacket for Chain of Ideas informs us that Ibram X. Kendi is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, “popularly known as the Genius Grant.”

Ibram X. Kendi’s real name is Ibram Henry Rogers. When he married in 2013, he took his Jamaican wife’s last name, because of course he did. When he learned that Prince Henry the Navigator had played a role in the Atlantic slave trade he concluded that the name “Henry” was forever tainted, so he replaced it with Xolani, a Zulu word meaning “peace,” a concept the Zulus were known for honoring in the breach.

Chain of Ideas begins by narrating Renaud Camus’ visit to Hérault in the south of France in 1996, which was his “eureka” moment, leading him to formulate the idea that Europe is being subjected to the “Great Replacement,” i.e., genocide by replacing white Europeans with non-whites from around the globe.

The Great Replacement is a fact, which Kendi refers to as a “theory,” a “conspiracy theory” to be exact, and a “perfect fiction.” In Kendi’s words:

The aim of Great Replacement theorists and politicians is “the replacement of democracy with dictatorship” (p. xxiii).

Who is behind Great Replacement theory and politics? In Kendi’s view, it is not just “white people” who are trying to maintain white privilege and white power, for this sort of analysis conceals who is really behind it all: “economic and political elites” who are “conjuring up fictional tales of the great replacement” (p. xxxii). The real culprits are “the truly dominant group of oligarchs” (p. xxxvi).

In other words, the richest and most powerful people in the world are promoting the Great Replacement to destroy democracy and cement their control over the planet. This is Kendi’s own conspiracy theory about who is behind the Great Replacement “conspiracy theory.”

Kendi claims that the Great Replacement is an “old” theory. Only the name is different (p. xxx). The original name, it turns out, is Nazism: “Camus’ fiction reads as a second printing of Adolf Hitler’s fiction, when he first imagined a flood of Jews replacing Germans” (p. 493).

Not only is “great replacement theory” simply neo-Nazism, all the politicians that Kendi associates with “great replacement theory” are neo-Nazis as well:

Elsewhere in the book, Kendi names many other great replacement politicians, including Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, José Antonio Kast, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, Alice Weidel, Pierre Poilievre, Jair Bolsonaro, Georgia Meloni, Nayib Bukele, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin.

Presumably, they too are all neo-Nazis.

If they deny this charge, Kendi says they are just lying. Kendi even coins a term, “orchestrated distancing,” for such lies. When New Rightists like me distinguish ourselves from Old Rightists like the interwar fascists, he thinks that’s just a charade.

Kendi’s whole argument is a reductio ad Hitlerum: the Great Replacement is evil because it is like Hitler. In short, it is a smear. But it is no ordinary smear. It is a smear with a really broad brush. Indeed, by the end of the book, Kendi even dispenses with the distinction between Nazism and neo-Nazism as a spurious nuance: “But these old Nazi ideas in our time are Nazi ideas. There’s nothing new or neo about them” (p. 501).

According to Kendi:

Once these conditions were ripe:

I am sure that Renaud Camus will be pleased to hear that the Great Replacement is now the dominant political theory of our time. But he will be crestfallen to learn that he’s really just a Nazi and a tool of oligarchs who wish to secure their wealth and power by replacing democracy with dictatorship.

Kendi’s conspiracy theory is also an old one. The idea that fascism is just an oligarchic trick is an old Marxist canard. Naturally, Marxist theories imply Marxist practices. Thus Kendi ends his book with a call for the Dictatorship of the Rainbow Proletariat.

First, he advocates putting Great Replacement politicians in jail. After all, if Hitler had been jailed forever after the Munich Putsch attempt in 1923, he could never have come to power. Thus Kendi lauds lawfare against Trump, Bolsonaro, and Marine Le Pen (pp. 503–506).

Second, he advocates brainwashing and censorship:

Another reform Kendi advocates is universal democracy in which people are informed about the different candidates and their positions by “nonpartisan commissions” (p. 597). Presumably there will be no candidates who oppose the Great Replacement, because they will be in jail or we will never be able to hear about them in the media.

For Kendi, “Nothing minimizes the draw of great replacement theory like radically improving societal conditions” (p. 507), which he thinks will happen through the magic of progressive social uplift programs:

In sum: Kendi’s argument is that the Great Replacement is just a Nazi lie cooked up by oligarchs who want to destroy democracy. Since Nazism is evil, those who talk about and politically oppose the Great Replacement must be censored and jailed. That—such as it is—is the argument of Chain of Ideas, reduced to fewer than five pages. Now let’s look at the evidence Kendi offers.

Is the Great Replacement a Fiction?

No, the Great Replacement is not a fiction.

Liberals, Leftists, and anti-whites routinely trumpet the Great Replacement from the rooftops.

For instance, on June 13, 1998, US President Bill Clinton gave a commencement address at Portland State University proclaiming that, due to nonwhite immigration, in 50 years America would be majority non-white. He admitted that, “No other nation in history has gone through demographic change of this magnitude in so short a time.” He understood that this will make America’s leadership and culture less white. But he hailed this as progress.

On March 21, 2000, the United Nations released a 177-page report entitled “Replacement Migration: Is it A Solution to Declining and Ageing Populations?” The focus was on European and advanced East Asian societies with below replacement birthrates. The question was: Can these societies maintain their social systems by importing people from the Third World? The assumption of the report is that such replacement is already underway in some countries. The conclusion of the report is to recommend it to others.

People like Bill Clinton or the authors of the UN report don’t object to Camus’ claims on factual grounds. Instead, their objection is that people like Camus do not like and welcome the Great Replacement, whereas they do.

But for some reason, when faced with people who oppose the Great Replacement, anti-whites do not focus on the real issue that separates them, which is a matter of values. Instead, they issue blanket factual denials that the Great Replacement is even happening.

This is called the “Celebration Parallax”: the Great Replacement is real if you celebrate it. It is unreal if you oppose it.

Most proponents of the Great Replacement refuse to defend their positions in good faith. Those who will argue typically go through three stages. Step 1 is Great Replacement Denial. When one points out that Leftists routinely celebrate that the Great Replacement is actually happening, many Deniers will simply drop out of the argument and hunt for more naïve and gullible people to deceive.

But some move on to step 2: They admit the Great Replacement is real, but they argue it is a good thing because “diversity” makes everything better. Never mind the rapes, the terrorism, the crime, the no-go zones. Think of the ethnic foods, as if we couldn’t import recipes and leave the people behind.

Since it is easy to show that the Great Replacement actually makes white societies worse in practically every indicator of social well-being, many multiculturalists will bail out at this point. Those who remain engaged in the discussion move rapidly to step 3: they admit that the Great Replacement is happening. They admit that multiculturalism causes white people to suffer. But then they assert that white people deserve to suffer good and hard because we are evil: “Something something colonialism. Something something slavery. Something something white privilege.” And so forth.

Kendi hovers between denying the Great Replacement and claiming that it is a good thing. These views are contradictory. If the Great Replacement is a fiction, then it isn’t happening. If it isn’t happening, then it can’t be a good thing.

Chain of Ideas is a very long book. If Kendi cared to offer evidence that the Great Replacement is unreal, surely he could have fit it in. Yet he offers nothing.

In response to Camus, he makes such perfunctory claims as there were Africans and Maghrebis in France long ago. Sure. How many? Has that amount been increasing?

He also claims that 90% of French residents are not immigrants (p. xxi). First of all, it isn’t true. And second, a snapshot like that cannot refute the thesis that there is a trend toward ever-growing non-white populations in France and an ever-shrinking white population, which is in fact the case.

As for the claim that increased diversity is a good thing, Kendi simply asserts that the contrary position is a product of “zero-sum” thinking, which he treats as self-evidently fallacious. Kendi loves to discuss demographics in snapshots rather than looking at trends. But when it comes to resource competition, we need to look at snapshots, because at any given time, it is always zero-sum: if there are ten jobs available, non-white gains are white losses. If non-whites use more social services on average than whites, then whites must pay through higher taxes, inflation, or national debt.

But what about the future? To argue that increasing diversity increases opportunities and resources, we need some evidence that diversity increases things like social capital, cooperation, and productivity. Yet Kendi offers no evidence that adding Africans or Muslims to white societies is an improvement. Indeed, how can you make a society more productive by lowering the average IQ? (Of course Kendi would dismiss that as racist pseudoscience.)

Instead, Kendi airily asserts that migrants inevitably boost “economic and cultural activity.” But, as Henry Hazlitt famously pointed out, you can increase economic activity by breaking a window. Thus economic activity does not necessarily mean we are all better off. Increasing the demand for burglar bars does not make society richer. Replacing burned out cars does not make society richer. And not every “cultural” activity is a boon, e.g., honor killings, dope dealing, twerking.

Kendi asks with a straight face why adding Muslims to a society doesn’t increase the amount of religious freedom (p. 38). How much religious freedom do we find in Muslim countries? None? What makes you think they will treat white people any better?

He flat out declares, “Trump’s Republican Party fabricated an invasion of black and brown immigrants to blame the Democratic Party for it” (p. 498). Actually, no, the Democratic Party did wave in 20 to 25 million invaders during the Biden administration.

Every page of Chain of Ideas is graced with such statements. At first, I found myself making excuses for Kendi. “Maybe he’s misinformed. Maybe he’s stupid.” But at a certain point, I ceased giving him the benefit of the doubt and concluded that Ibram X. Kendi is a shameless liar.

Is the Great Replacement “Theory” Promoted by the Establishment?

What evidence does Kendi offer for his Marxist tale that the idea of the Great Replacement is being promoted by the oligarchic establishment to overthrow democracy and protect their wealth? Nothing at all. How could he? It is a complete inversion of the truth.

In fact, most of the super-rich profit handsomely from the Great Replacement. Moreover, Black Lives Matter and other “anti-racist” organizations have been lavishly supported by billionaire oligarchs like MacKenzie Scott and George Soros, as well as Fortune 500 corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, Apple, Bank of America, Intel, Airbnb, and Uber.

I know of exactly one billionaire who has devoted serious money to White Nationalist-related ideas, and he has stopped because of harassment from the establishment, which is overwhelmingly opposed to acknowledging or combatting the Great Replacement. Kendi does not even mention his name. I know of zero big corporations that have supported White Nationalism.

Kendi can claim that “great replacement financiers” exist only by stretching the term to encompass the whole of the center Right.

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is Kendi’s primary focus. Musk is pilloried as a “financier” of Great Replacement politics, but this is untrue. Musk’s primary contribution to the spread of the idea of the Great Replacement is buying Twitter and rolling back the censorship of Right-wing voices. (I am still banned there, however, as are many other white advocates.)

Moreover, Musk interacts with accounts that promote awareness of the Great Replacement. He also has voiced support for parties that support immigration restriction and Remigration.

But in practice, Musk is a promoter of the Great Replacement. He has imported large numbers of non-whites, primarily from South and East Asia, to work in his companies, and he defends such policies on economic grounds, rejecting white identitarian principles.

Donald Trump, of course, is a billionaire who has run on immigration restriction. Trump also has many wealthy backers. But his biggest donors have been Zionists angling for war with Iran and oligarchs angling for more immigration.

In the Republic of Letters, the worst vice is intellectual dishonesty. However, the second-worst vice is lack of charity. Thus we should consider all other options before concluding that a writer is intellectually dishonest. We should be especially wary of this conclusion when dealing with those with whom we passionately disagree. But again, Kendi’s position is such a flagrant inversion of the truth that I cannot convince myself that he is honestly mistaken.

Is Resisting the Great Replacement Neo-Nazism?

No, opposition to the Great Replacement is not neo-Nazism, or paleo-Nazism for that matter.

But I can see how this could be an honest mistake. After all, German National Socialism, described in very general terms, was an authoritarian European nationalist ideology that held that non-whites could not be Germans. Opponents of the Great Replacement in white countries are white. They also tend to describe themselves as nationalists. They are “racists” insofar as they reject the idea that non-whites can be members of white nations. Finally, many opponents of the Great Replacement are “authoritarian” insofar as they recognize that decisive state action is necessary to close borders and commence Remigration. There are, moreover, actual Nazis and neo-Nazis among contemporary opponents of the Great Replacement. Indeed, they were among the first.

But the resemblance breaks down when one looks at the details.

When German National Socialism formed after the First World War, Germany was not facing anything resembling the Great Replacement. Even after the war, German birthrates were above replacement. If anything, there were too many Germans being born, not too few, which is why Hitler dreamed of expanding German territory into the East. By contrast, the starting point of today’s white identity politics is below-replacement fertility in all white countries.

Interwar Germany was not being flooded by non-white migrants. There was some illegal Jewish immigration into Germany from Poland, but this hardly constituted a demographic threat to German survival. By contrast, white countries today are facing replacement-level migration from the non-white world, primarily Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.

National Socialist Germany was focused, first, on bringing German populations into the Reich, which can be defended on the basis of national self-determination. However, when Hitler began annexing the territory of other peoples—beginning with the Czechs—it was clear that he was really a German imperialist who wanted to expand Germany at the expense of other white nations. Naturally, Kendi takes every opportunity to remind us that Hitler advanced these goals by war and genocide.

By contrast, today’s white identity politics is focused primarily on reversing demographic decline, closing borders, and the Remigration of non-white colonizers. Remigration, moreover, is completely consistent with respecting the basic human rights of all parties. Remigration is the polar opposite of genocide. In fact, Remigration is the only alternative to white genocide by ethnic replacement

These are not minor differences, so how does Kendi argue his thesis that opposition to the Great Replacement is just “Nazism”? Chain of Ideas is rather short on chains of argument. Instead, Kendi deploys a mishmash of essentially irrational techniques of emotional manipulation. Basically, he simply alternates between talking about opposition to the Great Replacement and the Nazis—shoehorning them in, if necessary—in the hope that this will trigger deeply-conditioned horror at the Nazis and the Holocaust and allow him to redirect these emotions onto Remigration advocates.

Kendi offers three kinds of connections between the Nazis and Great Replacement opponents: 1. wholly specious parallels, 2. proximities in space and time, and 3. endless, repetitive jump cutting between the two that takes on the quality of a fugue.

Some Specious Parallels

We have already encountered Kendi’s claim that “Camus’ fiction reads as a second printing of Adolf Hitler’s fiction, when he first imagined a flood of Jews replacing Germans” (p. 493). No, Hitler did not imagine a flood of Jews replacing Germans. He didn’t like Jews moving to Austria or Germany. But his reasons had nothing to do with the threat of demographic swamping.

We have also encountered Kendi’s claim that “Hitler justified the Holocaust as preventing the extermination of white Aryans. He imagined that genocide to rationalize the genocide. As did Camus” (pp. 494–95). No, Hitler did not decide to genocide Jews because he believed they were going to genocide Aryans, although he was quite alarmed by the mass slaughter of whites by the Bolsheviks, who were disproportionately Jewish. Also, it is utterly scurrilous to claim that Camus is offering a justification for genocide, given that his whole argument is premised on the idea that genocide is simply immoral.

After mentioning Trump’s promise of “the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” Kendi remarks: “German Nazis and their collaborators executed one of the single largest mass deportation programs in history when they forcibly remigrated millions of European Jews to concentration camps outside of their home countries” (p. xxi). Note the fuzzy-mindedness: you can’t “remigrate” people to somewhere “outside of their home countries.” Remigration means returning people to their home countries.

In passages like this, Kendi doesn’t prove that Nazis and opponents of the Great Replacement are the same. He simply offers tendentious, inaccurate descriptions that erase all differences. In short, this is nothing but a smear job.

This Can’t Be a Coincidence!

Kendi loves to conjure up specious connections based on mere coincidences in time and place.

For instance, on page 244, Kendi mentions a “secret meeting” of “great replacement financiers, transnational political operatives, and AfD members” near Potsdam, Germany, on November 25, 2023 to discuss remigration. On pages 256–57, Kendi portentously notes that “It may not be a coincidence” that the conference was held a mere 8 kilometers from the location of the 1942 “Wannsee Conference” where the Holocaust was reportedly planned. In Kendi’s mind, the fact that two meetings took place 8 kilometers from one another makes it plausible that there was no difference between planning a genocide and planning to stop a genocide.

Note, moreover, that the fact that the meetings took place 81 years apart seems to hold no significance to Kendi. Yet Kendi makes a great deal of temporal coincidences elsewhere in Chain of Ideas. For instance, Kendi portentously informs us that Renaud Camus was born on “August 10, 1946, fifty-seven days after the birth of one Donald J. Trump” (p. xvii). On page 11, we learn that “Marine Le Pen was born in 1968, the year a movie that evoked great replacement theory was released in the United States.” The movie was: The Planet of the Apes. No, The Planet of the Apes was not about how white people were replaced by fast-breeding ape immigrants due to open borders and globalization. On page 275, Kendi sees fit to mention that Alain de Benoist founded GRECE in 1968, “incidentally, the year of Marine Le Pen’s birth.”

Does Kendi think that such connections add plausibility to his book? Is he pandering to schizophrenics and low-IQ people who find such connections meaningful? Or is he one of them?

The Fugue of Ideas

In classical music, a fugue (from the Latin fuga, meaning flight or escape) is a form of counterpoint in which a theme is introduced and then “wanders” between different voices, is interspersed with new melodic material, then returns. Chain of Ideas has a strangely fugue-like structure. First, Kendi says something about the opponents of the Great Replacement, then he talks about the Nazis, then he jumps back to the present, then back to the Nazis, then he’s off on another tangent. Apparently, he thinks he can accomplish through sheer repetition and variation what he cannot accomplish through simple logic.

As an example, let’s look at the first part of the book, which comprises 10 chapters, most of them only a few pages long. It is called “Link 1: White people lose out as peoples of color gain.” A better title would be “Theme and Variations on Marine Le Pen.”

Chapter 1 begins with Marine Le Pen’s appearance on 60 Minutes on March 5th, 2017. Then it jumps to March 5th, 1933, the day the Nazi party won the largest number of seats in Germany’s legislature. Then it cuts back to Anderson Cooper beginning the 60 Minutes interview. Then it returns to Hitler’s reign of terror, which found local collaborators all over Europe. Then we hear about the post-war era, when Nazi ideas were being laundered through parties with “National” in their name. René Binet was one of those collaborators, one of those post-war launderers. Like Hitler, he was a “great replacement theorist” avant la lettre. Binet was an influence on Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French National Front and the father of Marine Le Pen. Mr. Le Pen we are told was merely peddling Nazism in a disguised form.

Chapter 2 begins with Anderson Cooper again. We’ve now arrived at his introduction of Marine Le Pen. But then it jumps to Donald Trump, who two months before the 60 Minutes broadcast took the oath of office as the 45th US President. Then Kendi jumps to 2011, when Trump wanted Barack Obama to show his birth certificate to prove that he was eligible to be US President. You see, to be US President, you must be born in America, and when Obama was in the Senate, the press referred to him as “Kenya-born.” Kendi thinks Trump’s motive was self-evidently racist. Then we jump back to 2008 and the election of Barack Obama. This, Kendi believes, sparked a vast and violent racial backlash in America. Renaud Camus thought Obama’s election was a sign of the Great Replacement, as indeed it was. An unqualified affirmative action candidate took the job of President twice from more qualified white candidates. Then we’re back to Trump on The View talking about Obama’s birth certificate. Then we jump forward to 2020 when Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris to be his running mate. Then we jump back to 60 Minutes. Here’s how he describes Anderson Cooper: “Cooper’s hands clasped close to his knees, his thumbs touching, nearly making a heart sign” (p. 9). Then Kendi describes Marine Le Pen’s clothes, her expressions, her backdrop, her posture, as if these concretes will somehow make this mishmash into an argument. Then we’re back to Anderson Cooper speaking again.

Chapter 3, “Orchestrated Distancing,” begins in 2011. A journalist interviews the Le Pen family. This is when we learn that Marine Le Pen was born the same year as The Planet of the Apes was released. The movie was originally a novel by a French author, Pierre Boulle, which reminds Kendi of another novel by another French author, this one published in 1973: Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, which really does deal with the Great Replacement. Camp of the Saints was a major literary sensation, just like Mein Kampf. It influenced Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, and Steve Bannon. Then we hop to the French Generation Identity movement. Marine Le Pen maintains her distance from them, because they are neo-Nazis (like her), and she is trying to hide that fact. Then we’re back to the 60 Minutes interview. Tick tick tick tick.

Chapter 4, “2011,” returns to the fateful year 2011. That’s when Marine Le Pen took the helm of her father’s political party. It is the year Renaud Camus published The Great Replacement. It was also the year that Donald Trump first demanded Obama’s birth certificate. Then we digress to various public policy studies. This is where the “zero-sum” slogan is introduced. Kendi continually refers back to it, as if it has been proved that “Human groups are natural allies against inequity” not “natural enemies.” The zero-sum idea, we are told, leads to “mass murder” (p. 19), not putting actual groups in zero-sum competition.

The talk of mass murder triggers another jump. Chapter 5, “Oslo,” is about Anders Behring Breivik’s killing spree, which is described in great detail: “He hunted, keeping up his cover as a police officer to lure people closer to him for an easier shot. An allegory for great replacement theory” (p. 21). I guess Breivik was demographically replacing the campers at Utøya.

Chapter 6, “Declaration of Independence,” begins with Breivik’s “Manifesto,” a 1,518-page data dump. Then it wends its way back to Jean-Marie Le Penn and Marine Le Pen. Yes, she’s still on 60 Minutes.

Chapter 7, “Great Recession,” begins with 60 Minutes then veers off to the Great Recession that started in 2008 and that Kendi regards as a stimulus to the rise of Great Replacement theory and politics. After all, they both contain the word “Great.” Then Kendi veers back to Marine Le Pen on 60 Minutes.

Chapter 8, “Who Is France?” begins with Marine Le Pen on 60 Minutes. The question of Islam and French identity is raised, so naturally Kendi mentions the Dreyfus Affair, because when Islamic terrorism and crime come up, it is natural to flash back more than a century to talk about an innocent Jew. Dreyfus is France’s Emett Till.

Chapter 9, “Lost Causes,” focuses on the now self-evidently fallacious zero-sum thinking in relation to blacks in America, including the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. At the end, Kendi flits back to Marine Le Pen.

Chapter 10, “Long Shadow,” begins with Anderson Cooper and Marine Le Pen talking about deportations and expulsions. Kendi is worried that Cooper is trying to humanize Marine Le Pen by talking about her life and family. Perhaps to counteract that, Kendi jumps back to 1927, when thousands of white-robed KKK members marched through Queens, NY. Then, in 1928 in France, a French Catholic couple (the kind of people who were not welcomed by the Klan) gave birth to a baby boy named Jean-Marie Le Pen. Jump back to the 1927 Klan march, where a riot broke out. One of the rioters who was arrested was Fred Trump, the father of Donald Trump.

Do you see how it all fits together?

Is Resisting the Great Replacement “Authoritarian”?

As for the question of “authoritarianism,” the fact that Kendi advocates jailing and censoring his opponents is instructive. It would be cheap to accuse him of hypocrisy. I simply wish to note that:

Kendi probably enjoys many features of modern liberal democracy. But when freedom of speech or freedom to organize get in the way of what’s really important to him, he does not hesitate to set them aside. That’s a perfectly reasonable attitude.

For most modern white identitarians, the jury is still out on liberal democracy. After all, liberal democracies in the past had closed borders. Liberal democracies were capable of mass Remigration initiatives like Operation Wetback. Liberal democracies were also quite “racist” until recently. So it remains to be seen whether liberal democracy can be reconciled with Remigration.

If it can’t, however, then it will be replaced. I don’t care about bequeathing liberal democratic forms to brown people. I care about saving our race.

A New Category of Lunatic?

Paranoia typically involves false pattern recognition, false inferences, and false senses of significance (such as regarding accidental proximities in space and time as meaningful), all driven by underlying feelings of fear and hatred. Thus it is reasonable to describe Chain of Ideas as a paranoid confabulation.

But typically, paranoids don’t churn out massive tomes. Is Ibram X. Kendi a new category of lunatic, then, the high-functioning paranoid schizophrenic?

Or is Kendi perfectly sane but just trying to drive his readers nuts? Since Kendi’s strategy is to equate Identitarianism and Remigration with the Nazis and the Holocaust, triggering ingrained horror responses then seeking to attach those emotions onto new objects, the tone is frequently hysterical, and Kendi’s goal can be fairly described as “gaslighting.” He’s trying to unbalance his readers’ minds. One characteristic of neurotics is misdirected fear and anger. The negative feelings they feel toward dad or their ex- or the Nazis are triggered and dumped on bewildered innocent parties who simply resemble the real objects of their feelings.

More than 500 pages of Kendi would be sheer torture, a sort of literary Abu Ghraib, were it not for the unintentionally funny bad writing. His crack-brained connections based on numbers and word-associations will make you howl with laughter. So too will his descriptions. Here’s how he introduces Geert Wilders: “A treasured blonde mop of hair. No mustache. No goatee. Skinny lips. Prominent chin. He stands well over 6 feet tall. He could almost pass for a younger and more slender Donald Trump” (p. 195).

Yes, but what about muttonchops?

Although 2026 isn’t even half over, I am confident that Chain of Ideas is the dumbest book of the year. It is not, moreover, “so bad it’s good.” It’s not Ed Wood bad, not The Bridges of Madison County bad. You won’t be yukking it up at parties by reading out passages from it. It’s just bad-bad: dumb, dishonest, utterly contemptible.

But there’s some consolation here. A system that lionizes a mountebank like Ibram X. Kendi as a sage and a “genius” surely isn’t long for this world.